ODYSSEY OF THE WEST I A Classic Education through the Great Books HEBREWS AND GREEKS COURSE GUIDE Professor Timothy B. Shutt, KENYON COLLEGE, Series Editor Featuring Professors Eric H. Cline, Kim J. Hartswick, Peter Meineck, and Lawrence H. Schiffman Odyssey of the West I: A Classic Education through the Great Books Hebrews and Greeks Professor Timothy B. Shutt Kenyon College Series Editor Featuring Professors Eric H. Cline, Kim J. Hartswick, Peter Meineck, and Lawrence H. Schiffman Recorded Books™ is a trademark of Recorded Books, LLC. All rights reserved. Odyssey of the West I: A Classic Education through the Great Books Hebrews and Greeks Professor Timothy B. Shutt, series editor Featuring Professors Eric H. Cline, Kim J. Hartswick, Peter Meineck, and Lawrence H. Schiffman
Executive Producer John J. Alexander Executive Editor Donna F. Carnahan RECORDING Producer - David Markowitz Director - Matthew Cavnar COURSE GUIDE Editor - James Gallagher Design - Edward White Lecture content ©2007 by Timothy B. Shutt, ©2007 by Lawrence H. Schiffman, ©2007 by Peter Meineck, ©2007 by Eric H. Cline, and ©2007 by Kim J. Hartswick Course guide ©2007 by Recorded Books, LLC 72007 by Recorded Books, LLC Cover image: Greek statue © PhotoDisc/Planet Art #UT090 ISBN: 978-1-4281-2745-6 All beliefs and opinions expressed in this audio/video program and accompanying course guide are those of the author and not of Recorded Books, LLC, or its employees. Course Syllabus Odyssey of the West I: A Classic Education through the Great Books Hebrews and Greeks About Your Professor...................................................................................................4 Introduction...................................................................................................................5 Lecture 1 From Sumer to Athens ..........................................................................6 Professor Timothy B. Shutt Lecture 2 The Epic of Gilgamesh ..........................................................................9 Professor Timothy B. Shutt Lecture 3 The Hebrew Bible: Historical Background and Genesis .....................12 Professor Timothy B. Shutt Lecture 4 The Hebrew Bible: Exodus and the Covenant ....................................19 Professor Lawrence H. Schiffman Lecture 5 The Hebrew Bible: Psalms, Prophets, The Song of Songs, and Job...............................................................23 Professor Lawrence H. Schiffman Lecture 6 Greece: From the Bronze Age to the Archaic Age..............................27 Professor Eric H. Cline Lecture 7 The Iliad ...............................................................................................31 Professor Timothy B. Shutt Lecture 8 Homer: The Odyssey...........................................................................35 Professor Timothy B. Shutt Lecture 9 Hesiod and Lyric Poetry ......................................................................39 Professor Peter Meineck Lecture 10 Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus ..................................................................45 Professor Peter Meineck Lecture 11 Greek Tragedy: Sophocles ..................................................................53 Professor Peter Meineck Lecture 12 Greek Tragedy: Euripides....................................................................58 Professor Peter Meineck Lecture 13 Herodotus of Halicarnassus ................................................................63 Professor Timothy B. Shutt Lecture 14 Greek Art .............................................................................................68 Professor Kim J. Hartswick Course Materials ........................................................................................................72 3 Photo courtesy of Timothy B. Shutt About Your Professors Photo courtesy of Eric H. Cline TIMOTHY B. SHUTT is a professor of humane studies and has taught at Kenyon College, famed for splendid teaching, literary tradition, and unwavering commitment to the liberal arts, for more than twenty years. No teacher at Kenyon has ever been more often honored, both by the college and by students, for exceptional skills in the classroom and as a lecturer. His courses in Kenyon’s interdisciplinary Integrated Program in Humane Studies are always heavily oversubscribed, and he lectures on Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, the Greek historians, Virgil, and Dante every year to a packed house. Photo courtesy of Kim J. Hartswick ERIC H. CLINE, a former Fulbright scholar, is chair of the Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the George Washington University, where he holds a joint appointment as an associate professor in both the Classics/Semitics Department and the Anthropology Department. He is the author or editor of seven books and has more than seventy articles and book reviews to his credit. KIM J. HARTSWICK is the academic director of the City University of New York (CUNY) Baccalaureate Program. Previously, he was a professor of art history and archaeology at the George Washington University in Washington, DC, for more than two decades. He also held teaching appointments at the American University in Paris and at Bryn Mawr College. © Lois Greenfield PETER MEINECK is a clinical assistant professor of classics and ancient studies at New York University and artistic director of the Aquila Theatre Company. He teaches ancient drama, Greek literature, and classical mythology. He has held teaching appointments at Princeton University, the University of South Carolina, and the Tisch School of the Arts. Photo courtesy of Lawrence H. Schiffman LAWRENCE H. SCHIFFMAN is the Ethel and Irvin A. Edelman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and chair of the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Among his published works are Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (1994) and Sectarian Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls: Courts, Testimony, and the Penal Code (1983). 4 © PhotoDisc/PlanetArt Introduction This course is inspired by the introductory course of instruction in the Integrated Program in Humane Studies at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio: an elective, double-credit, interdisciplinary overview of Western culture from its Middle Eastern origins to the present. The course addresses in chronological sequence a series of major works that have shaped—and indeed, questioned—the ongoing development of Western thought both in its own right and in cultural dialogue with other traditions. In the process it likewise, and inevitably, engages many of the most perennial and far-reaching questions that we face even still in our daily lives. How can we best live? What is most important in human life? Love? Righteousness? Kindness? Wealth? Justice? Power? Does the world itself finally make sense? Does it operate in accordance with laws that we can understand? To what extent? Where and where not? Is there really a right way to behave? Is goodness something built into the nature of things? Or is it something we make up, a social convention, a human construct? Is there a God—something standing behind and giving rise to all we encounter. Or is religious belief, in the last analysis, delusion? In the lectures to follow, we will be drawing upon the resources of a wide variety of disciplines—history, philosophy, literary study, art history, religious studies, political science, and the history of technology and science among them—in hopes of engaging in something which at least suggests in its fullness the rich and profoundly interactive discussion which over the course of forty centuries has made of Western culture what it is. The course, then, will consist of a connected series of lectures, delivered by a variety of scholars, working in a variety of disciplines and in a variety of colleges and universities, each one addressing an area of personal expertise and each one focusing not only on the matter at hand, but on the larger story—on the interconnections between the works and figures to be discussed. 5 Lecture 1: From Sumer to Athens (Professor Timothy B. Shutt) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Marc Van De Mieroop’s A History of the Ancient Near East: Ca. 3000–323 BC. The precursors and antecedents to the culture of the West reach back deep into human prehistory to the very origin of humankind. When exactly that took place is a complicated question, but modern humans, so we are told, first developed in Africa, most likely in East Africa, some 120 thousand years ago, though such estimates vary. Be that as it may, it took some time for modern humans to make their way to the more northerly regions, then inhabited by the strong, stocky, and admirably cold-adapted Neandertals (or Neanderthals). And whatever their early mode of interaction, about forty thousand years ago something changed and changed profoundly. Up to that time Neandertals and modern humans seem to have used much the same kind of relatively simple stone tools. And all of a sudden, in a geological eye-blink, everything is different—different at least for modern humans, if not for Neandertals, who in all but the rarest cases continued to use much the same tools as their forebears. Modern humans, though, initiated a technological explosion that has not yet abated. What caused this cultural revolution remains unclear. The remains of early humans before and after this transformation do not look radically different. But clearly, something happened. My own guess, for what it is worth—and there are many who would concur—is that language use more or less suddenly attained its fully modern level of sophistication with all the mental and linguistic equipment that goes with it. Whether for that reason or for other reasons, within a few thousand years the last Neandertals were gone. For modern humans, though, change continued apace. As the last ice age began to wane, and climates changed accordingly, somewhere in the Middle East agriculture began with native grains, emmer wheat, and barley, and generation by generation made its way westward. By 8000 or 9000 BCE, in the Middle East, there were not only farms, but villages, ultimately small cities. It was not an unmixed blessing. Agriculture could support a far denser population than even the most skilled hunting and gathering, but at a stiff price. You had to work much harder and you didn’t live any longer. Nonetheless, for good and for ill, the foundations were laid, not only for Western culture, but at slightly different times and in different places, for the cultures of Southeast Asia, India, China, and ultimately Mexico and Central America and the high Andes as well. LECTURE ONE These early farmers were succeeded in time by a series of more or less urban civilizations in Mesopotamia, the land between (and around) the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, for the most part in what is now Iraq. First among them, it seems, was Sumer, indeed the first on record worldwide, a culture that makes its appearance around 4500 BCE and which lasted for the better part of twenty-five hundred years, with cities—Eridu, Uruk, and Ur, among 6 others—not too far from what is now Basra near the Persian Gulf. Starting about 3300 BCE, the Sumerians developed a form of writing, inscribing wedge-shaped marks with a stylus—a cuneus, in Latin—into clay tablets, a mode of writing, “cunieform,” later adopted by many of their successors in the ancient Middle East. In a land without readily defensible frontiers, political stability proved hard to come by, and after the time of Sargon of Akkad (ca. 2300 BCE), the first real empire builder on record, empires and dynasties succeeded one another in bewildering succession—Elamites, Kassites, Amorites, and Hittites as well as the more familiar Babylonians and Assyrians. The Old Babylonian empire is famous for the law-giver Hammurapi (or Hammurabi), who flourished in the early eighteenth century BCE, and Babylon was notable as well for its astronomical and mathematical achievements. But Babylon gave way at last to Assyria, a ferociously expansionist chariotbased military power from further north, which fell in its turn in 605 BCE to a revivified Babylon, with the assistance of the Medes from the mountains to the north. And then the Babylonians too fell, to Persia under the inspired leadership of Cyrus, who founded an empire, the largest yet, which fell at last to Alexander of Macedon. 7 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How could language have caused the technological explosion among modern humans? 2. What was the price paid for moving to an agricultural society from one based on hunting and gathering? Suggested Reading Van De Mieroop, Marc. A History of the Ancient Near East: Ca. 3000–323 BC. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004. Other Books of Interest Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. LECTURE ONE Saggs, H.W.F. Civilization Before Greece and Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. 8 Lecture 2: The Epic of Gilgamesh (Professor Timothy B. Shutt) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Stephanie Dalley’s Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. The Epic of Gilgamesh is by a wide margin the oldest work of its kind that survives, and it was for centuries—not to say for millennia—popular throughout the Middle East. Versions are attested not only in Sumerian and, in multiple fragmentary variants, in Akkadian (the language of Babylon and Assyria), but in Hittite and Hurrian as well, and fragments have been found from Anatolia to Palestine to the Middle Euphrates region, throughout Mesopotamia and beyond. And indeed, so-called “Gilgamesh figures”— heroes fighting with animals represented on cylinder seals and the like—are attested from much earlier than any written account of Gilgamesh, back to deep into the third millennium BCE. The earliest stories about Gilgamesh date in written form to about 2150 BCE and the reign of King Shulgi of the Sumerian city of Ur, who evidently thought of Gilgamesh as a relative, indeed as a (much earlier) brother since both claimed descent from Ninsun, the goddess “Lady Wild Cow.” And a Gilgamesh does in fact appear early in the Sumerian king list. For the most part, however, the “standard version” of the epic derives from Akkadian cuneiform tablets found in the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in a palace library constructed by the rulers Sennacherib and Assurbanipal in the seventh century BCE, some fifteen hundred years later than the earliest extant Sumerian tales about Gilgamesh. These last survive, in part, because cuneiform tablets are fired into permanence rather than destroyed when the library enclosing them is burned and hence survived the destruction of Nineveh itself in 612 BCE. Even so, the evidence, though abundant, is fragmentary. Even fired cuneiform tablets break easily, and many versions and variants of the Gilgamesh stories survive. Even the best recent attempts to collate them into something resembling a coherent story are full of missing lines, partial lines, and fragments of all kinds. The Epic of Gilgamesh, then, is very different from other ancient texts that are comparable in genre and importance. Like The Epic of Gilgamesh, both the Hebrew Bible and the poems of Homer derive in large part from oral tradition, but for both we have something like a fixed and more or less canonical text. For Gilgamesh, we have nothing of the kind. What we have instead is a provocative and deeply suggestive series of overlapping fragments. But provocative and deeply suggestive they are, as we might expect in view of their manifest and enduring popularity both in their own time and, to a lesser degree, since their modern rediscovery. Gilgamesh is, in his way, a 9 prototypical culture hero, and his activities and achievements clearly exemplify many of the leading concerns not just perhaps of his own culture, but of all human culture at all times. Many of the issues that he confronts—love, death, and friendship, the possibilities and limits of human achievement— are issues that all of us must confront, and the rueful advice of Siduri the “alewife” in the “Old Babylonian” version of the tale has a potentially universal relevance. Undone by the death of his boon-companion Enkidu, Gilgamesh has sought for immortality, and in at least some versions of the tale, has come close to achieving it, but at last he fails, as we must, and the alewife advises, according to the Oxford translation of Stephanie Dalley, “You will not find the eternal life you seek.” Therefore, “Gilgamesh, let your stomach be full, / Day and night enjoy yourself in every way,” and “Appreciate the child who holds your hand, / Let your wife enjoy herself in your lap.” LECTURE TWO In the standard Ninevite recension of the tale—traditionally compiled by the “master scribe” Sin-leqe-unnini in the Kassite period (ca. 1650–1150 BCE)— that is, five hundred years and more before the surviving tablets—we are told that after Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh seeks out Ur-shanabi “the boatman” and Ut-napishtim “the far-distant,” the latter the now-immortal survivor of a worldwide flood very much reminiscent of Noah’s flood, and presumably in some sense its parallel or prototype. But though Gilgamesh finds a magic plant with which “a man may win back the breath of life,” he is unable to keep it—and loses the plant to a serpent, remaining as mortal as before. Thus it is that he who “found out all things” and “experienced everything,” he who “gained complete wisdom” and “found out what was secret and uncovered what was hidden,” found out above all that human life is subject to unsurpassable limitations that cannot be surmounted by any mode of striving, and which, however regretfully, must in the last analysis be accepted. Gilgamesh is the founder of cities, symbolically the founder of civilization. He “had the wall of Uruk built”; he and Enkidu overcame the fearsome forest monster Humbaba and slew the Bull of Heaven. “Two-thirds of him,” in fact, “was divine,” and only “one-third mortal.” But that one-third proved enough. Enough for Gilgamesh, and all the more so, presumably, for us. 10 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How does The Epic of Gilgamesh differ from the Hebrew Bible and the poems of Homer? 2. What profound human issues does Gilgamesh confront? Suggested Reading Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Other Books of Interest Beckman, Gary M., Benjamin R. Foster, and Douglas Frayne, eds. The Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 11 Lecture 3: The Hebrew Bible: Historical Background and Genesis (Professor Timothy B. Shutt) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is John J. Collins’s Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Contribution The Hebrew Bible is, quite simply, the most influential book ever written. Other religious texts, of course, have been powerfully influential. But none more so than the Hebrew Bible, to this very day a sacred text to roughly half the people on earth, as it has been for well more than two thousand years. In the West, of course, its influence has been particularly pronounced. It addresses, straight on and heads up, a series of issues of the most enduring importance. How should we live? Where did we come from? Where are we going? And the answers that it provides have shaped Western culture, in many respects, more profoundly than any others ever proposed. What the Hebrews contributed above all was their religious sensibility, and most importantly, perhaps, a rigorous sense of monotheism—the notion that there is but one God, creator of the world, and source and guardian of righteousness. The idea seems to have developed gradually, and the idea that God created the world from absolutely nothing seems, for that matter, to have developed gradually too. But long before the beginning of the Common Era, both conceptions were firmly in place, and their influence is overwhelmingly with us to this day. LECTURE THREE The Hebrews likewise contributed their religious ethic of righteousness and of compassion. Our own sense of ethics has been so powerfully shaped by this Hebrew, and later Christian and Islamic set of ideas, that it is hard for us to imagine what else an ethical vision could consist of—if kindness, compassion, and righteousness are not virtues, then what could virtue possibly be? Other answers, though, are possible, and as we will see, in antiquity other answers were proposed. Likewise, the Hebrews contributed their sense of history. This sense too is now so ingrained in us that it is hard to imagine things ever having been otherwise, but for the Greeks, as for most ancient cultures, history was more or less meaningless. The world had always been, the world would always be, and on the most profound level, things pretty much stayed as they were, moving at best in cycles, like the cycle of the seasons. But because of the notion of Covenant, the notion that God had chosen and had, in effect, made a contract with the Hebrew people, and again, because God had created the world— there was a time when the world was not—and because he intervened in history and guided the world, the Hebrews did not regard the flow of time and events as meaningless. On the contrary, they were full of meaning. Things in the past, before the Covenant, let alone before the Creation, were different than they are now. And things will be different in the future. Indeed, if we 12 behave ourselves and do what we are supposed to, they will be better. Here is the germ of the idea of progress that is so important in contemporary Western culture. Finally, Hebrews were influential in their emphasis on the Torah, the Law, and accordingly in their emphasis on literacy. Literacy was important to the Hebrews, and as a result they may have enjoyed as a group what was very probably the highest literacy rate in the ancient world. Historical Context The Hebrew Bible, influential as it has been, is a very peculiar book, not least because it is, in a sense, not so much a book as a one-volume library. Many of the oral traditions reflected in Genesis and elsewhere go back to very early times. As we have seen, traditions about a great flood—and other traditions that make their appearance in the Hebrew Bible—appear throughout the Middle East and date to a time long before there is any record of the Hebrews. At Genesis 12, though, most scholars see a sort of break in the narrative. Up to that point, Genesis has chronicled mostly sacred myths and legends. These are immensely important to posterity, but they are on the whole stories about why things are the way they are—“etiological” stories or “just so” stories—and not what one would ordinarily recognize as historical accounts. With the story of Abraham and his family, that to some extent changes. He is said to have come from a real and quite specific place, and is said to have migrated with all his household from Ur to, at last, the land of Canaan, the land that he believed that God had promised him. The event can plausibly be dated to some time relatively early in the second millennium BCE. The descent into Egypt associated with the stories of Joseph can be dated a century and a half or so later. And the decisive event for the later history of Israel, the miraculous flight from Egypt under Moses, seems to have taken place about 1250 BCE. Even in the promised land, however, the Hebrews found themselves in a chronically dangerous situation, between Egypt on the one hand and the Mesopotamian powers on the other, with the Canaanites right next door. In response, ancient Israel turned somewhat reluctantly to the institution of kingship, first to Saul, and then to David and Solomon. David succeeded in uniting the twelve tribes of Israel and establishing a capital on neutral ground in Jerusalem about 1000 BCE, and his son Solomon built the first Temple there and reigned well into the last third of the 900s. At Solomon’s death, however, a succession dispute led to the fragmentation of the Davidic kingdom. The northern portion, Israel, with its capital ultimately in Samaria, broke away, while the land of Judah in the south remained. The monarchy was never reunited, and in 721 BCE Sargon II of Assyria captured and destroyed the northern kingdom and Samaria. Times were hardly less difficult for the kingdom of Judah. Assyria herself fell to a reinvigorated Babylon, and it was the Babylonians who first besieged and finally sacked and defeated Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah in 586/87 BCE. Solomon’s Temple was desecrated and destroyed, and the surviving Hebrew leadership in Jerusalem was deported to exile in Babylon, there to remain until Babylon fell in its turn to Cyrus and the Persians, who in 538 BCE allowed the surviving refugees in Babylon to return to their homeland. 13 The Four Strands That is the historical context in which much of the Hebrew Bible was composed, and in one way or another, the Bible reflects the turmoil of those unsettled and violent times. Dealing in particular with the Pentateuch or Torah, the first five books of the Bible, biblical scholars have discerned four major strands of tradition. The first and oldest two were distinguished by the name that each characteristically used for God, “YHWH,” in the first instance, or in German “JHVH” (whence “Jehovah”), and “Elohim” in the second. The first, or “Yahwistic” account, commonly termed by scripture scholars “J,” was evidently composed in the south, in Judah, conceivably as early as the time of David and Solomon. It is, in a literary sense, anthropomorphic, vigorous, and lively—God forms Adam of red clay—but for all that it is, in a theological sense, deeply provocative and compelling. It is in J, for example, that we find the account of the Fall. The “Elohistic” account, or “E,” makes characteristic use of the plural “Elohim” to refer to God, and was evidently composed a bit later than J, and in the north. It covers much the same series of events, and in the existing form of the Bible we often have as a result parallel or slightly variant accounts, both lovingly preserved. The third major strand that scholars discerned in the existing Torah was termed “Deuteronomic” or “D.” It consists, not too surprisingly, for the most part of the book of Deuteronomy, the heart of which is a second, furtherreaching, account of the Law that was granted, as we read in Exodus, to Moses and the Hebrews at Sinai. This third biblical strand evidently dates from around 621/22 BCE, when according to 2 Kings, the high priest is said to have “found the book of the law in the house of the LORD” (22.8), prompting a nationwide reform movement in Judah, which in its turn helped to avert disaster for another generation, until, the reformist impulse spent, Judah fell at last to Babylon. LECTURE THREE The impact of this last event would be difficult to overstate, both in the formation of the Bible and in the formation of Hebrew ideas more generally. For if God was who the Israelites thought he was—the only and righteous and omnipotent God, not only of the Hebrews but of all nations and all creation— then how could he allow his chosen people to be so utterly defeated? How could he allow his own Temple, even the Ark of the Covenant itself, to be desecrated by unclean, unbelieving hands? The destruction of Judah and of the Temple, the Babylonian exile, provoked a crisis, and the Bible as we have it speaks powerfully of the answers that the Hebrews found. For despite all, the Hebrews did survive—and did return, thanks to the good offices of Cyrus of Persia, and did indeed rebuild the Temple. And the last of the four strands, the “Priestly” account, or “P,” reflects these events and the concerns of the priesthood, preserving and reconstituting their traditions under the stress of dislocation and exile, and also thinking through the implications of God’s universal majesty and rule. Much of the Priestly account makes for rather dry reading, but the glorious first verses of Genesis (1.1–2.4)—“God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (1.3); “So God created man in his own image . . . male and female he created them” (1.27)—are another matter entirely. The creation account, in all its magnificence, is one of the mainstays of Hebrew monotheism. 14 The Issues By the mid-fifth century, 458 BCE or thereabouts, then, the Torah reached its present form under the hands of pious editors and redactors eager to preserve sacred tradition in all its richness and variety. Other works later found inclusion in the wider Hebrew Bible—in 458, indeed, some were not even yet written—but the Torah remains the living heart of Hebrew devotion. What, then, are the issues addressed by the Hebrew Bible? The answer is straightforward enough: the central problems of human life—we age, we grow sick, we die, and we suffer, and there doesn’t really seem to be much we can do about it. Not in the long run. Try as we will, things just don’t turn out as we would like. It is as simple as that, and it begins, appropriately enough, in Genesis. The solution, though, is a little more complicated. As we have already seen, Genesis offers two accounts of the creation. It opens with the Priestly account, which is distinctive and important in suggesting, if not quite stating, that God created the world out of nothing. And humans, according to the Priestly account, are created, male and female alike, in the divine image. The early Yahwistic account, or “J,” gives a considerably more earthy account of human origins. Adam, on this view, begins quite literally as a mudball, formed, we are told, “of dust from the ground” (2.7), and Eve is later formed from one of Adam’s ribs (2.21–22). And in this account, of course, they fall, eating of the forbidden “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2.16) in the hope of becoming “like God” (3.5). This is where, above all, we get the definitive statement of the problems that the Hebrew Bible seeks to address. For we live in a world full of problems, and the Fall encodes in narrative terms pretty much all of them. First of all, Adam and Eve fall by eating of the “tree of knowledge.” They are told beforehand that if they eat of it, they will die. But they don’t. Or not right away. What they gain instead is the knowledge of death. All living things die, of course, but so far as we know, only humans are aware of the fact beforehand, or maybe aware of it at all. Knowledge in the full human sense is not just awareness. It is self-consciousness, the paradoxical ability to step outside of yourself, to look at yourself as if you were someone else, to imagine yourself in the future, in another place, or in the past. That full awareness is, on one hand, presumably part of the divine image. But on the other hand, that full awareness is what enables us to know that we are going to die, not only to suffer death, but to anticipate it. To know good and evil as well as to experience pleasant and unpleasant things. And the tree of knowledge has other resonances. It is, among other things, a way of talking about self-consciousness itself, which in an odd way separates us from nature and from the flow of things, and can even separate us from ourselves. In our easiest, happiest states, we are simply doing what we are doing—working, playing, loving, talking, or whatever. We are not thinking about it. When we become self-conscious, when we are not swept up in the moment, we are ordinarily uncomfortable and more often than not ineffective. Self-consciousness can alienate us from ourselves; we can, and sometimes do, watch ourselves with disgusted disapproval. Self-consciousness, in the very nature of the case, sets us apart from our surroundings, whatever at the 15 moment they may be. The tree of knowledge—which is to say, full, fallen humanity—in this sense at least, bears bitter fruit. But the fruits of the fall, sad to say—or the problems encoded in the story— go way beyond alienation and self-consciousness. They also include our flawedness, our propensity to violence, and the fact, as anyone who has ever embarked on a self-improvement campaign knows, that willpower is generally not enough, and that we don’t always do, even can’t always do, what we want to or think that we should. And it’s not just we who are flawed. The whole world is flawed. Above and beyond the fact of death, we confront pain, we confront sickness, we confront the necessity of work. However much we get, we want more. And to top it all off, we can only live—all animals can only live—by consuming other living or once-living creatures. And even plants compete for water, light, and space. We live surrounded by competitive predation, and we know in the end we’ll lose. In light of such difficulties, why even bother? That is the problem the Hebrew Bible seeks to address. Why Bother? LECTURE THREE And it proposes an answer, in fact, a whole series of answers, each in a sense further-reaching than those that went before. All of them, to greater or lesser degree, center on the notion of covenant. A covenant is an agreement, not unlike a contract, or treaty, or loyalty oath, between a greater person or power and a lesser person or power, ordinarily outlining the services and loyalties expected by the greater power in return for benefits bestowed. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden serve in a sense under an implied covenant. They may live, prosper, and remain in the Garden so long as they don’t eat the forbidden fruit. After their expulsion from the Garden, the expectations under which their descendants live are not formalized by explicit agreements or commands, though the biblical account clearly suggests that God still has and still enforces expectations for human behavior. So much so, in fact, that at the time of Noah, we are told that God very nearly gives up in disgust at the whole human project. Noah and his family alone, and the various animals safe in his ark, survive God’s wrath. At the end, though, God himself reconsiders and offers the rainbow as a token of the first covenant explicitly so called, an unusual covenant in that no particular actions are called for on the part of human beings to bring about the fulfillment of God’s promise that “the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh” (9.15). God’s ethical expectations, though, still hold. We advance only two chapters before the Tower of Babel gives offense, and humans are cursed with the diversity of languages that helps to make mutual understanding so difficult—and that makes it much more difficult to attain the “knowledge” that Adam and Eve sought. But the punishment this time falls short of even the prospect of universal annihilation. These early covenants, both explicit and implied, have applied to everybody—or at least, in the case of Adam and Eve, to everybody who’s around. With the call of Abraham, that changes. It is as if God has decided to work in a new way. Rather than calling upon all humanity, he calls a single nation or family—indeed, at the beginning, he calls upon a single man. 16 The Covenant of Abraham The story begins in Genesis 12 with the call of Abraham: “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing,” and “by you all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves.” Abraham obeys, and once he has arrived in the promised land of Canaan, God promises him, in old age, an heir, and makes the covenant between them explicit. Abraham is to “be blameless” (17.1), and God speaks to him in the following terms: “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your descendants after you. And I will give to you, and to your descendants” all “the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession” (17.7– 8). Abraham’s obedience and allegiance are shortly put severely to the test when in one of the most famous, most perplexing, and most decisive passages in the Bible, he is called upon to sacrifice his son Isaac, the very promised heir through whom God’s covenant with Abraham is to be fulfilled. “Here am I,” says Abraham once again, in willing response to God’s call, and faithfully sets about obeying the dreadful command whose fulfillment will by all human calculation result in the voiding of the promise and the extinction of all his hopes. He and Isaac travel to Mount Moriah, by later tradition the site of the Temple, where Isaac is not sacrificed after all, and Abraham’s faith and obedience are triumphantly justified, and the covenant is confirmed. The Sinai covenant of Moses, the Law, expands and enriches and confirms the covenant of Abraham, but does not overturn it. And the fundamental answer that it proposes to human waywardness and suffering, to our parlous place in the world where we find ourselves, is the same. Obey and prosper. The Lord is with you. 17 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How did the Hebrews help to shape the modern sense of ethics? 2. What was the historical context in which the Hebrew Bible was composed? Suggested Reading Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2004. Other Books of Interest LECTURE THREE Flanders, Henry Jackson, Robert W. Crapps, and David A. Smith. People of the Covenant: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 18 Lecture 4: The Hebrew Bible: Exodus and the Covenant (Professor Lawrence H. Schiffman) The Suggested Readings for this lecture are John J. Collins’s Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Nahum M. Sarna’s Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel. The Greatest Story of Redemption Exodus is a central book for understanding how the Bible impacted Western civilization and for understanding its influence on Judaism and Christianity. The name “Exodus” is based on the title in the Greek Bible, and refers to the central theme of the book—the Jews’ going out of Egypt. Israel, at the time numbering just seventy people, migrated to Egypt in time of famine and became enslaved. This set the stage for the greatest story of redemption from slavery known in the history of humanity. “Exodus” was understood later on to mean not only an exodus from physical slavery but from spiritual slavery as well, which was emblematic of the themes of this book: physical redemption and the giving of the law, the Torah. One of the greatest accomplishments of the author of this book is that all the themes of the book fit perfectly into its narrative structure. In the Hebrew Bible, the book is positioned after Genesis and before Leviticus, Numbers, and finally Deuteronomy. Out of Egypt The story follows the rise of Moses—who, though a Hebrew, had emerged from the elite of Egypt to become the redeemer of Israel. One of the most central aspects here is the notion that Moses himself was designated by God as a type of superprophet who could communicate directly with God. Throughout the story, Moses is intertwined with his nemesis, the Pharaoh, who probably lived around 1250 BCE. Furthermore, the Pharaoh seems to have come from the dynasty that did not appreciate how Joseph, the Jewish viceroy to a previous king, had predicted and then protected Egypt from seven years of famine. This Pharaoh enslaved the Hebrews against the spirit of Israelite-Egyptian relations that had existed earlier. Moses negotiates with the Pharaoh with the assistance of Aaron, Moses’s brother. With God’s miraculous intervention, Moses sends the Ten Plagues to urge Pharaoh to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt. Moses instructs the people as to how to celebrate the first Passover, laying the basis for the Passover celebration that is held to this day. Moses then leads the Jewish people out of Egypt. At the Sea of Reeds (often called the Red Sea), he finds that the Egyptians have changed their minds and are bearing down on the Israelites. Moses commands the Israelites to cross the waters, which part miraculously so that the Israelites go 19 through on dry ground, but when the Egyptians follow, the sea closes violently on them. The Israelites then sing the “Song of the Sea,” also known as the “Song of Moses,” which is taken by most scholars to be one of the earliest pieces of poetry in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible. Everything that has happened to this point is only a preparation for the Covenant and the revelation that the Israelites experience when they arrive at Mt. Sinai—a mountain in the desert. In an act of divine revelation, God speaks the Ten Commandments, which seals the Covenant between God and Israel. Israel will be God’s special people, carrying his laws throughout history, and God will be their one and only God. Moses sets up a system of courts and officials, and the book ends with laws: the Covenant code, covering civic and religious matters. The people are commanded by Moses to set up the Tabernacle to symbolize that the experience of Sinai would remain with them, that they had been liberated both physically and spiritually. Dating and Historicity There are many problems raised by this book, including its dating and historicity. The events are commonly accepted as having occurred about 1250 BCE, when there was a transition in Canaan to a different kind of culture representative of ancient Israel. There is no archaeological evidence for a violent takeover, but there is evidence for a material change in the culture. But was this a result of the Exodus? Biblical minimalists argue that the events in the Bible did not happen. They argue that the Israelites were never in Egypt, and the transition was due to an internal change. Biblical maximalists, on the other hand, argue that one has to look at the biblical narrative and parallels with what happened in Egypt at the time and conclude that the events really did take place. In the Merneptah Stele (approximately 1200 to 1209 BCE), a record of a people called Israel is listed in an official Egyptian inscription. The language of the inscription indicates that the Israelites were people who lived in the land of Canaan, but were not yet settled in the land. Such a state could have been the result of a recent Exodus. It is also important to note that some Egyptologists maintain that the Exodus should be dated to about 1450 BCE, which was the traditional Jewish and Christian dating before modern biblical studies revised the chronology. LECTURE FOUR The Jewish historian Josephus, who died about 100 CE, argued that the Pharaoh of the Exodus was one who came to rule when the native Egyptians expelled the Hyksos, a foreign Semitic people who ruled Egypt for a time. Such an event would align the Pharaoh with the ruler who did not acknowledge Joseph. The Bible notes the shift from indentured servitude for the Israelites to a harsher slavery. Ancient letters discovered from workers in Dar El Medina, written while they were building royal tombs, elucidate the way the Israelites might have acted during their first period of servitude. Still, there is no Egyptian source that directly documents the slavery and Exodus. Josephus, however, preserved a quotation of two versions of the 20 Exodus that have been combined into one by a man named Manetho, who lived in the fourth century BCE and provided historians with the entire Egyptian chronology. He tells two stories abut the Jewish experience in Egypt, corresponding to the two dates (1450 and 1250 BCE) discussed previously. Manetho says he copied the stories from the walls of temples in Egypt. Having lived before the Bible was translated into Greek, he could only have copied from an Egyptian source, thereby supporting an Egyptian parallel for the Exodus. Themes of Exodus The idea of human rights is enshrined in the Israelites’ quest to escape slavery, and it is never divorced from the idea of receiving the divine law, the Covenant. The message of the Exodus is that freedom can only be had through a legal system provided by a divine being (that is, law comes from God, not from within society). The Bible guarantees rights to everyone and does not discriminate by rank in society, as does the often-compared Code of Hammurabi. The first Passover and the connection to redemption is also important in this book. Passover is mentioned at many points in the biblical narrative, and its celebration is found in the Bible over and over through the centuries. The importance of Passover is that it provides the message that people can overcome adversity and obtain freedom. Furthermore, it teaches the idea of messianic redemption, and that any future redemption will be a reflection of the first Passover. Jewish and Christian messianic ideas always involve the notion that along with physical redemption comes spiritual redemption. So Passover sets the pattern for the notion that there can be a better world and that human beings are capable of being redeemed. 21 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. What are the major themes of Exodus? 2. What potential problems are there with the dating and historicity of Exodus? Suggested Reading Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2004. Sarna, Nahum M. Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1996. Other Books of Interest Bright, John. A History of Israel. 4th ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000. LECTURE FOUR Shanks, Hershel, ed. Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1999. 22 Lecture 5: The Hebrew Bible: Psalms, Prophets, The Song of Songs, and Job (Professor Lawrence H. Schiffman) The Suggested Readings for this lecture are John J. Collins’s Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and J. Alberto Soggin’s Introduction to the Old Testament: From Its Origins to the Closing of the Alexandrian Canon. From Moses Forward The Hebrew Bible consists of three parts: the Five Books of Moses, the Prophets, and the Writings. After the five books of Moses, the books of Psalms, Prophets, the Song of Songs, and Job set out biblical theology. These books trace the way in which the tradition of Moses was carried forward in Israelite society by the prophets and ancient sages. Historical Context These books discuss the conquest of Canaan, the period of rule by the Judges, the period of the monarchy of David and Solomon (the United Monarchy), the Divided Monarchy until the point in 722 BCE when the Northern Kingdom was destroyed, and finally the decline of the Southern Kingdom until its ultimate destruction and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 586 BCE. These books are linked to many ancient Near Eastern texts. The prophetic approaches they chronicle can be compared to some of the soothsaying in surrounding nations, and it is possible to compare many of the Psalms to the poetry of the ancient North Canaanites in a place called Ugarit in what is today Syria. The Book of Job can be compared with certain speculations in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt about good and evil, and the Song of Songs can be compared to love poetry in those cultures. The Bible speaks in the language and style that was popular in the ancient Near Eastern environment in which the books were produced. Divine Inspiration and the Prophets A part of the divine canon is the history of the idea of divine inspiration. As we move from the earlier to the later books of the Bible, we find there is a move from the most direct level of inspiration toward interpretation and internal inspiration. Moses was a prophet who spoke directly to God, whereas the following prophets received less direct inspiration, while asleep or through parables. Each one of these texts is a window on Hebrew biblical theology and thought, and each is a major factor in the later development of Judaism and Christianity. Prophets is a large collection of texts. The Former Prophets tell the history of Israel. The Latter Prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Isaiah lived when the Assyrians were getting ready to destroy the Northern Kingdom and 23 to make war with the Southern Kingdom. Jeremiah lived exactly at the time when the Temple was destroyed, and Ezekiel lived in the same period and somewhat afterward. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel teach the essential ideas of prophetic Judaism. They define good and evil, exhort human beings to respond to God’s Torah by observing it and living by it, and preach that the failure to do so (especially through inequality and impure monotheism) literally brings misfortune. The Prophets stress over and over that transgression against the Torah brings war, destruction, and social upheaval. The Prophets always prophesy conditionally, arguing that if Israel will repent with a pure heart and soul, misfortune may be averted. Psalms The Psalms maintain that the Torah is the divine wisdom that ought to inform humanity and its ways, and at the same time they provide an unbelievable window on the personal anguish of people living in ancient Israel. People were struggling, trying to figure out why their crops failed, why they experienced sickness, or why good people had to suffer. Virtually every important question of religion and theology is addressed in the Psalms. The Suffering of Job In Job, there is a discussion of good and evil. Job was a pious man. The Adversary (Satan) says to God that he can prove Job is not righteous by making him suffer. Job’s children die and everything is taken from him. The book switches from a prose introduction to a poetic section in which there is a long debate about the nature of evil and God’s relationship to humanity. Three friends come to comfort Job and say that Job is being punished for transgressions against God. But Job protests that he is a righteous man. Elihu reprimands the three friends and puts forward his own views, and then castigates Job for not accepting his fate. In the end, God speaks out of a whirlwind and declares that Job doesn’t know and can’t know the reason for suffering because that is the way of the world. Only God knows how good and evil are meted out. Job accepts his inability to understand and is then finally rewarded for his piety. People must have argued in First Temple times about fundamental aspects of Israelite religion, and Job shows the richness of this kind of debate and reflects a systematic exploration of the fundamental issue of how a person should live and what one should care about. LECTURE FIVE Song of Songs When one reads the Song of Songs, the simple meaning of the text is to exalt the love between a man and a woman. This love is later interpreted by Jews as the love between God and his people and by Christians as the love between Jesus and his church. On the one hand there is the pure sensual love of a man and a woman described in detail. On the other hand, it is clear that those who included the Song of Songs in the biblical collection already understood it to be a description of love between God and his people. 24 The Themes When looking at these books as a whole and the themes discussed, a conclusion can be drawn about the richness of the theological and religious discussion that was going on in ancient times. In the context of these lectures, this is important, because the Greek neighbors of ancient Israel were engaged in the exploration of the same kinds of questions. The Bible is often read as a simplistic account of the history of ancient Israel, while we often turn to the Greeks for serious discussion of theology, morality, and ethics. But it is very clear that this material is also in the Bible and that these issues were being debated. The seeking of wisdom is a common theme in all these books. Whoever put the canon together wanted the books to be read together to follow this and other themes through their development. The Prophets teach humility, as does Psalms, Job, and Ecclesiastes. As in Exodus, in the Prophets there is a strong sense of redemption. After the destruction of the Temple, the idea of redemption and restoration moves to the forefront. The books contain a marketplace of biblical ideas in which concepts regarding the fundamental issues that plague human beings and their relationship with one another and with God are being debated. While there are some differing points of view, fundamental notions remain: the notion that there is one God who rules the world and creates an order that people do not always understand but must nevertheless live in, and the notion that eventually there will be a better world. All these are fundamental concepts that run through the Hebrew Bible and which emerge later on as central to both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. If there is one principle that Judaism and Christianity acquired from this tradition, it is the internal debate and the quest for truth that typifies these texts. It is this debate that introduces readers to the rich heritage of the Bible. 25 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How is the book of Job a good representation of the arguments about Israelite religion people must have had in First Temple times? 2. What themes run through the books discussed in this lecture? Suggested Reading Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2004. Soggin, J. Alberto. Introduction to the Old Testament: From Its Origins to the Closing of the Alexandrian Canon. Trans. J. Bowden. 3rd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1980. Other Books of Interest Podhoretz, Norman. The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are. New York: Free Press, 2002. LECTURE FIVE Shanks, Hershel, ed. Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1999. 26 Lecture 6: Greece: From the Bronze Age to the Archaic Age (Professor Eric H. Cline) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Ian B. Morris and Barry B. Powell’s The Greeks: History, Culture, and Society. Jump-starting Civilization The Bronze Age opened about 3000 BCE. This was an era in which Greece, as well as other regions around the world, saw the invention of bronze, which can be credited for jump-starting civilization. For the first thousand years of the Bronze Age, the Greeks’ Cycladic Islands stood out, in part because of the magnificent marble idols found there. These were mostly found on graves, presumably indicative of a belief in religion as well as something along the lines of a belief in life after death. At about 2000 BCE, the island of Crete and the Minoans became important. The Minoan palace of Knossos seems to be the source of the myth of Theseus and the minotaur. The myth of Atlantis probably also goes back to the Bronze Age. At this time, the Minoan and Mycenaeans (on the Greek mainland) already seem to have worshiped the Greek gods and goddesses that will be important later. Zeus and Hera were already being worshiped, for example. We know this from the clay tablets the Greeks wrote on during the Bronze Age, using an early form of Greek. The Mycenaeans flourished from about 1700 to 1100 BCE. They had monumental architecture, paintings, and even poetry. Indeed, the Mycenaeans mark the high point of culture that is reached during the Bronze Age. In the second millennium BCE, the Greeks were in contact with places as far away as Egypt, Cyprus, and even ancient Mesopotamia. Imported objects were moving back and forth between Greece and Egypt and the Near East. Some scholars have thereby speculated that some of the early developments in Greece may have ultimately been attributable to Egypt and the Near East, but if so, then the Greeks turned them into something purely Greek. Greece Rises Again This entire Bronze Age civilization disappears sometime around the year 1200 BCE, and a dark age begins, which lasts for up to three hundred years. A great deal of what the Minoans and Mycenaeans had learned simply disappears during these dark ages. About the year 800 BCE, in the time of the Greek Renaissance, Greece began to rise back up. Egypt and the Near East might have again exerted their influence, because there is evidence of merchants and traders bringing back goods and possibly new ideas and influences. The Greeks learned how to write again and invented the Greek alphabet still used today, which they got from the Phoenicians, who invented the first alphabet. With the advent of 27 this new type of writing, the Greeks were able to pull themselves up and begin their civilization anew. The year 776 BCE, for instance, marked the year the first Olympic games were held, at Olympia in southern Greece. They were held every four years and were sacred to Zeus. During the period of the games, all wars ceased at least for the moment. The original games featured horse races, foot races, and wrestling. Over the years, they grew bigger and more elaborate and included singing and dancing and drama. Poets and the Oracle at Delphi About 750 to 700 BCE came Greek poets like Hesiod (Works and Days and the Theogony) and Homer, providing a glimpse of life in Greece at this time. Homer told the story of the Trojan War, a war that took place about five hundred years before Homer lived, so one wonders how much Homer got correct, or whether, as is generally supposed, he in some ways combined details of the Iron and Bronze Ages. There were other poets in the eighth and seventh centuries, in particular Sappho, the first female poet of Greece, who hailed from the island of Lesbos. Sappho invented her own form of meter, called the Sapphic meter. On mainland Greece, there was the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. The oracle provided answers, and the Greeks, and others, took the answers seriously, but it wasn’t always clear what the answers meant. In the period from 750 to 600 BCE, the Greeks were becoming rapidly overpopulated and sought ways to take care of their excess population. They did this through colonization. Most of the major cities sent out colonies to other parts of the Mediterranean and set up trading establishments between mother city and colony. The oracle at Delphi often decided where to send these colonies. Sparta With the growth of the cities, we see the beginnings of poleis, or city-states: Athens and Sparta, as well as Thebes, Delphi, Corinth, and Megara among many others. Sparta and Athens were by far the most important, and eventually found themselves at odds with each other, in large part because of their different governing bodies. From about the eighth century BCE, the Spartan way of life was military and everything was geared toward that. There were two kings in place, one to go off to war and the other to remain at home. The kings were advised by a council of elders, with an assembly to advise them. LECTURE SIX Spartan boys would leave their parents at about the age of seven and stay in what amounted to military barracks, where they would be educated. This military society came about because the Spartans oversaw a large group of slaves, known as helots, mostly the people they had conquered. They were always fearful that the helots would rebel, and on occasion they did. For many centuries, the Spartans fielded the most feared and effective warriors in the Greek world, distinguished especially at the Battle of Thermopylae during the Persian Wars. There Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans held the pass at Thermopylae, allowing the Greeks to 28 regroup, which ultimately saved Greece. Spartans were held up as the epitome of military excellence and their women were held up as the most beautiful in Greece, but there were severe disagreements within the Greek culture over whether the Spartan way of life was the best way. Athens The Athenians, by contrast, had their own way of governing. They had been developing toward what is now called democracy. Athens is, in fact, given credit as the birthplace of democracy. The year this took place is identified as 508 BCE, during the reforms of Cleisthenes. In about 732 BCE in Athens, there was an attempt by an Olympic victor named Kylon to seize power in Athens and become a tyrant. There were a number of other tyrants in and around Greece at this time. A tyrant was not what might be thought today, but meant rather an aristocrat who seized power but was not supposed to have done so. Kylon went to the Acropolis and proclaimed himself the ruler of Athens, but the Athenians tossed him out. In 621, Draco put together a law code. His laws were extremely strict, with death as the penalty for almost any offense. About thirty years later, Solon, considered one of the seven ancient wise men, redrew Draco’s law code. He also revised the constitution, the class system, and instituted a council and assembly to advise the ruling archons. There were no kings, and in essence, Solon put Greece on the path to democracy. However, the road to democracy was temporarily sidetracked by Pisistratus. Pisistratus tried three times, in 561, 555, and 546 BCE, to become tyrant, succeeding the third time and ruling as a more or less benevolent tyrant until 528. He did a lot of good things, but did set back the path to democracy. When he died in 528, his two sons took over and ruled with iron fists until 511, when there was a rebellion and then a brief period of anarchy. In 508, Cleisthenes instituted new reforms that marked the birth of democracy. This was a pure democracy, and virtually no functions were delegated; citizens undertook them all directly. The United States today practices an off-shoot of this, though it is not a pure democracy. Cleisthenes is also credited with the idea of ostracism, in which a powerful citizen is sent into exile for ten years. Pre-Socratic Philosophers The pre-Socratic philosophers also came from this period. They addressed the nature of the universe, what it was made of, and what the earth looked like. The culmination of the pre-Socratic philosophers probably came with Democritus, who came up with the first expression of what would much later become the atomic theory. 29 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How was Greek development influenced by the Near East? 2. How did the Spartan military way of life come about? Suggested Reading Morris, Ian B., and Barry B. Powell. The Greeks: History, Culture, and Society. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005. Other Books of Interest Martin, Thomas R. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Pomeroy, Sarah B., Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Websites to Visit LECTURE SIX The British Museum provides a detailed section on ancient Greece — www.ancientgreece.co.uk 30 Lecture 7: The Iliad (Professor Timothy B. Shutt) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Homer’s The Iliad (translated by A.T. Murray). The Homeric World As we saw in our last lecture, shortly after 1200 BCE Mycenaean culture more or less collapsed, apparently as a result of a series of wide-ranging cultural disturbances that affected in one way or another pretty much the whole eastern Mediterranean basin. Egyptian records speak of the incursions of “Sea Peoples,” and the invaders, whoever they were, seem to have done their work all too thoroughly, putting an end not only to Mycenaean culture, but to the Hittite empire as well, making their presence felt throughout the region, whatever the final effect of their incursions. In the Mycenaean realm, their arrival proved, by all appearances, catastrophic. Archaeological records suggest a precipitous decline in both living standards and population, and the early Greek script—termed “Linear B”—seems to have been utterly forgotten, as the Hellenic world fell into an age far darker than that which beset Western Europe in early medieval times. The Homeric world, then, which is, of course, our focus in this lecture, is the Mycenaean world—but the Mycenaean world celebrated and remembered as four centuries and more later, in the eighth century BCE, the so-called dark ages drew to a close. In the interval, the mighty deeds of the Mycenaean “heroic age” appear to have been celebrated by generations of oral poets, preserving and no doubt embellishing the memory of past heroes such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus, and focusing their attention, in particular, on a large-scale raid or invasion undertaken by a coalition of Hellenic kings (or kinglets—their domains, from a modern perspective, were countysized and often less) aimed at an Anatolian city guarding the Hellespont, and with it trade routes from Europe to Asia and from the Aegean to the Black Sea—a city known to us as “Ilium” or “Troy.” There clearly was such a place—the remains are extant, just where they’re supposed to be—and there may well have been such a raid. And that raid or incursion is Homer’s subject—the Trojan War. Or more precisely, two months or so of the ninth year of what was purportedly a ten-year war, and the protracted return home of a single Greek leader. The rest we learn from tradition and from later references, not least from the surviving summaries of the socalled “Epic Cycle,” a series of poetic works, now lost, which addressed those parts of the wider story that Homer himself only hinted at or, indeed, left untold. 31 Definitive Texts Homer, then, is working from long-standing tradition, and his poems, as we have them show it, most notably in his all-pervasive use of what are called “formulas,” that is, set epithets and phrases, “many-minded Odysseus,” “rosy-fingered dawn,” and the like, repeated lines, and even repeated sequences of action, embodying, as often as not, a whole series of lines repeated effectively verbatim. An oral poet, after spending years mastering the craft, would make use of these formulae to compose extempore, realtime poems, each one minted fresh for the occasion from the poet’s stock of lines and phrases and the poet’s fund of inspiration. It was Homer’s good fortune, though, whoever he was, to live at a time when a newly invented and unprecedentedly efficient information-storage system was coming into use—the Greek alphabet, the first to make use of symbols for vowels as well as consonants. And this enabled Homer to compose at unprecedented length—far beyond what was possible in any single performance—while he, or someone else, wrote down the results. Hence, in part, the special quality of Homer. Oral poetry was simply too difficult to master to be worth the effort once writing was available—and accordingly, the living oral tradition seems to have withered (in Greece and elsewhere) within a generation or so of widespread literacy. LECTURE SEVEN Homer’s concerns, however, did not. Anything but. In fact, the Homeric poems became for ancient Greece the definitive, culturally defining educational texts. Everybody knew them, to some degree at least; everybody referred to them and quoted them, and in Athens in any case they were recited from beginning to end on a regular basis at public expense. The ancient Greeks did not have any sacred texts in quite the sense that the Hebrews did, but by a wide margin, Homer came closest (which is why, generations later, figures like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato felt compelled to contest Homer’s influence head on). The influence of Homer derived from several sources, his earliness—the first substantial works set down in writing—and his sheer literary merit high among them. But Homer was also important, probably even more important, as a cultural influence and cultural touchstone. Homer showed you how things were done and what was important. In previous lectures we have taken a look at what might be called the Hebrew ethic of righteousness and compassion. Homer’s ethical vision is quite different and turns in large part on the concepts of arête and kleos, that is, virtue or excellence and the glory that results from such virtue or excellence. To Homer, and to the Greeks in general, to be good was not so much to be kind and considerate as to be strong, powerful, beautiful, skilled, and smart. The prototype above all is Achilles, who in the Iliad is unquestionably and by a wide margin “the best of the Achaeans,” above all because no one comes even close to matching him in battle. Hence the conflict that dominates the story is not so much between Greeks and Trojans as between the leader of the Greek (or Achaean) coalition, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, and his greatest warrior, Achilles. Agamemnon has a sort of arête as king and leader of the Achaean host, and Achilles has another sort as, so we are told, the most terrifying man alive on the field of battle. Achilles is insulted by Agamemnon, who doesn’t much like 32 Achilles’ attitude anyhow, and accordingly withdraws from the fighting, hoping that the ensuing success of the Trojans will reveal to one and all just how indispensable he is. It does. Achilles responds by sending his bosom companion, Patroclus, into battle, wearing Achilles’ armor, in order to drive back the Trojans and Hector, their champion—thereby suggesting that even the reputation of Achilles, the false appearance of Achilles’ presence, is sufficient to turn the tide. Arête indeed. And for a time, it works. But then Hector slays Patroclus, strips Achilles’ armor from him, and thus, at least seemingly, replaces Achilles as the dominant figure on the battlefield. The grief-stricken Achilles is then faced with a choice. He has been given to understand by his divine mother, the sea nymph Thetis, that two possible destinies lie before him. One is a long, happy, and undistinguished life, and the other is a short life during which he will earn undying glory or kleos. If he avenges himself by killing Hector, he will achieve just that glory, but is fated himself to die shortly thereafter. And that is precisely what he does. The message in this regard is clear, or at least seemingly clear—arête and kleos are their own reward. The Iliad is a very long poem, of course, and the vision of Homer is vastly more nuanced and complex than this simple summary suggests. There are lots of qualifications and cross-currents at work, which enrich and deepen the poem in all sorts of ways. But no nuance or qualification, in my view of the matter, at least, finally or fatally undercuts the importance of the competition for kleos and arête either for the Homeric heroes of the Iliad or, for centuries to come, for Greece herself. 33 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How did Homer employ oral “formulae” in his poems? 2. How was Homer important as a cultural influence and cultural touchstone? Suggested Reading Homer. The Iliad. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Trans. A.T. Murray. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Other Books of Interest Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1990. LECTURE SEVEN ———. The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. 34 Lecture 8: Homer: The Odyssey (Professor Timothy B. Shutt) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Homer’s The Odyssey (translated by A.T. Murray). A Celebration of Nostos For my money, the Odyssey is, with the exception of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the finest literary work ever composed. Immensely shrewd, immensely subtle, and constructed with the light-handed, balanced intricacy of the work of the deftest of goldsmiths, it slyly answers and profoundly reconceives the vision of arête expressed in the Iliad. The language is Homeric, the formulae are Homeric, and the characters too are Homeric. But Homeric with an all-embracing difference in tone and key. According to universal and utterly plausible tradition, the Odyssey is a later work than the Iliad. In a sense, it presupposes the Iliad. And one can readily conceive of the Iliad as the work of the poet’s vigorous early middle age and of the Odyssey as the fruit of his hale and reflective later years. I, though, prefer another story, which I propose not so much as a potential literal truth as instead a sort of suggestive metaphor. It could be true, I suppose. We have no way to tell. But true or not, it points to a truth. Let us suppose that Homer, greatest and wisest of all oral poets, had an equally brilliant and much-beloved daughter or granddaughter. Let us suppose that she, unlike her father or grandfather, was easily literate, abreast of the times. Let us suppose, in fact, that it was she who served as Homer’s scribe, who worked with him in exponentially expanding the range and scale of oral poetry in the Iliad, and in the process, lovingly instructed by the best of teachers, came to master the oral tradition in her own right. And let us suppose that after the death of her father or grandfather, already by universal acclaim the greatest poet who had ever lived, she wryly and slyly took it upon herself, in her own middle age, to continue the story. I am not saying that is what happened. What I would like to suggest, though, is that the Odyssey reads as though it were. She knows the story and the tradition inside out. But she shows us things, and shows them repeatedly, from a woman’s point of view. Most of the Iliad takes place on the battlefield or in a military camp. Most of the Odyssey takes place, quite literally, in the dining room, where, indeed, Odysseus tells the stories of his travels, which we ordinarily think of as the main storyline of the Odyssey. These, in fact, occupy only four books out of twenty-four. And we don’t exactly see them. We hear about them—and in Odysseus’s own words. The great Jane Austen claims never to have written about a scene that she couldn’t have witnessed, and accordingly never to have penned a scene where women weren’t present. The author of the Odyssey, whoever he or 35 she was, could very nearly make the same claim. The author of the Iliad, most emphatically, could not. And the plot of the Odyssey is different too. Here we encounter not rage and war, certainly not as a keynote; instead the work celebrates “nostos,” or “homecoming,” the reintegration of home and society, which war disrupts and destroys. In all of these senses, the Odyssey celebrates a reconceptualization and widening of the Homeric ideal. Arête, in the Iliad, still bears the marks of its conceptual origins as preeminence in the crafts of Ares, the god of war. It is in precisely that sense that Achilles is the unrivaled best of the Greeks or Achaeans. And to be fair, the Odyssey too celebrates martial prowess. Odysseus finally dispatches the suitors with a vigor and resolute thoroughness—vastly outnumbered as he is—that even Achilles would be proud to match. But he has to make use of other skills—he has, indeed, to make use of the suggestion and help of Penelope—to put himself in a position, in a bolted banqueting hall, armed with bow and arrows, confronting men who are unarmed and trapped—where he can put his martial prowess to lethal effect. The Odyssey, in short, celebrates interior excellence—mental excellence and moral excellence—and the achievement of that sort of excellence, as the Odyssey repeatedly reminds us, is not defined by age, class, or gender. New Heroes In the Odyssey, Odysseus is repeatedly characterized as “polytropos,” as a man “of many turns.” In one sense, this epithet refers to Odysseus as a man to whom many different things, and many different kinds of things, happen. More profoundly, though, it signals Odysseus’s multifacetedness. He is a splendid speaker, a splendid strategist, deadly in battle, not only because of his raw prowess, but even more because of his cleverness. As Athena herself appreciatively remarks, he is one of the great liars of all time. He can rule, he can farm, he can build and sail ships. He can do pretty much everything. He is, evidently, all but irresistibly attractive to women—and for that matter, to goddesses. He is, in short, from a Greek perspective, a complete human being, able to do anything well, and at his absolute best in speaking and in thinking. He is in that sense a kind of idealized self-portrait of what the Greeks themselves wished to be, what in fact at their best they were. LECTURE EIGHT But the Odyssey not only extends the range of arête as we find it celebrated in the Iliad as something achievable at their best by warrior-kings. In the Odyssey arête can be achieved, it seems, by anyone in any social position. One of the heroes of the Odyssey is the virtuous swineherd, Eumaios, who is in fact a slave. And yet Eumaios demonstrates a hospitality, a loyalty, a courage, a respect for the gods and for custom, a careful and dutiful attention to his work, and a calm geniality that Homer finds wholly admirable. Wholly admirable, too, is Penelope, the woman for whom Odysseus gave up immortality, and so too, Eurykleia, the old nurse who with Penelope keeps the suitors at bay for years. So too, if perhaps not quite so persuasively, Odysseus’s son Telemachus. And so, in what is to me one of the most touching passages in the Odyssey, is Odysseus’s old hunting dog, Argos—Argos who, neglected and abandoned to die on a dung-heap, too 36 weak even to rise, recognizes Odysseus even when Odysseus is in disguise, and with his last breath does his best to greet his much-loved master, home at last after twenty years. The callous and disrespectful treatment of Argos, in fact, is a small exemplification of what is wrong with the horde of suitors who have besieged Penelope on the assumption that Odysseus is dead, and in hopes not only of bedding Penelope, but of ruling Ithaca as her consort. Unlike Odysseus and Eumaios, unlike Penelope and Eurycleia, unlike even Argos, the suitors do not show arête, even though, by virtue of their social position, they are the ones we would expect to show it. Their fundamental failure is their violation of nomos or “custom,” the way things are supposed to be and the way that people are supposed to behave. The world of the Iliad and the Odyssey is a world without enacted laws. But that does not mean that it is a world without rules or expectations. You are supposed to be respectful of the gods; you are supposed to be hospitable to strangers and wayfarers. The suitors are not. And when Telemachus grows to an age when he is able to realize what is going on, is potentially able to take over as king, the suitors’ response is to attempt to kill him. And they pay the price. Odysseus cleans house with a vengeance when at last he returns and reveals himself. Instead of in the suitors, we find arête in Ithaca among people whom it would not traditionally have been expected—in Penelope, in Eumaios, even in old Argos, who is in the usual sense of the term not even a person at all. One final point. In later antiquity, the Odyssey was often read in allegorical terms, read as a discussion of how one goes about achieving excellence, and once achieved, how one uses what one has gained to build a viable society. The Odyssey, in fact, divides neatly into halves, the first half concerning Odysseus’s travels and the travels of Telemachus to find out what has happened to him, the second half concerning events after his return to Ithaca. Over the course of his adventures, both before returning to Ithaca and after, Odysseus demonstrates that he is a man of many turns indeed, able to overcome the desire for ease and rest, as in Lotos-land, able to keep his head when confronted by desires that would turn most men into animals, as on the island of Circe, able, through foresight, both to hear and to resist the song of the Sirens, able to cut his losses and to deceive when necessary, as in confronting the Lestrygonians and in sailing past Scylla and Charybdis, and above all, perhaps, a man who can survive and prosper, when necessary, by simple, resourceful, long-suffering persistence. All of these virtues go to make up the sort of many-faceted, complete human being that came at last to comprise the Greek ideal. 37 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. In what ways is the Odyssey different from the Iliad? 2. What characters most embody arête in the Iliad? Suggested Reading Homer. The Odyssey. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Trans. A.T. Murray. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Other Books of Interest LECTURE EIGHT Homer. The Odyssey. 2 vols. 7th ed. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. 38 Lecture 9: Hesiod and Lyric Poetry (Professor Peter Meineck) The Suggested Readings for this lecture are Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony and Andrew W. Miller’s Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation. Hesiod Hesiod is one of Greece’s oldest known poets, dating from around 700 BCE. He is known for two major works: Theogony, a work that details the origins of the universe and genealogies of the gods, and Works and Days, probably composed after Theogony, which gives sage advice for living a good life and also includes some famous mythological material. Hesiod distinguishes himself from Homer in that he is the first poet in Western literature to identify himself and even to provide some biographical clues as to who he is. In the opening invocation to the Muses in Theogony, he relates how the “Helikonian Muses, who possess Mount Helikon, high and holy,” appeared to him as he was grazing his flock on the mountainside. “And they once taught Hesiod the art of singing verse.” Hesiod would have performed as a bard singing these works, but apparently not accompanied by the lyre, the derivation of the term “Lyric” poetry. One tradition informs us that Hesiod was disqualified from competing in a bardic competition in Delphi for not being able to play the lyre. His work has been described variously as “wisdom poetry” or “didactic epic”—a kind of everyman’s Homer. Certainly his Boeotian turns of phrase and homespun language would have seemed antiquated and rather rural to the sophisticated Athenians of the classical period. We sense the concerns of a local audience in the specific agricultural advice Hesiod gives to his errant brother Perses in Works and Days. From both works we can assume a few nuggets about Hesiod’s background. He came from a small rural village called Askra—a name that means something like “barren oak.” Hesiod himself said that his hometown was “bad in winter, god-awful in summer, nice never” (Works and Days, 640, trans. Lombardo). His father seems to have come from the city of Kyme in Asia Minor (north of modern-day Izmir in Turkey). Hesiod’s father seems to have been a seafarer or a merchant who fell on hard times and emigrated to Boeotia, where he had at least two sons, Hesiod and his layabout brother Perses. The influence of Asia Minor is marked on the work of Hesiod. In Theogony, the description of the origins of the universe (“In the beginning there was only chaos”) has strong parallels with Hittite, Babylonian, and Hebrew mythology. The violent succession of the gods also reflects the motifs found in the Babylonian Enuma Elish (“When on high”) and the Hittite Song of Kumbari. 39 The basic thematic structure of Theogony progresses in this manner: Invocation to the Muses Creation The Castration of Ouranus The Birth of Aphrodite The Primordial Gods Prometheus Bound for the Sacrifice Trick at Mekone Pandora Battle of Gods and Giants Zeus and the Olympians Catalogue of Goddesses and Heroes The basic thematic structure of Works and Days: Why Life Is Hard—Prometheus/Fire—Pandora The Five Ages of Man Golden Silver Bronze Heroes Iron On Justice The Farmer’s Year Good Advice Days Other works such as The Shield and The Catalogue of Women, attributed to Hesiod, were probably not authored by him. Lyric Poetry There are three forms of Greek poetry: epic, drama, and lyric. Lyric flourished in Greece from the first half of the seventh century BCE to the first half of the fifth century BCE. Homer mentions certain genres of lyric, such as hymns, paeans, marriage-songs, and funeral dirges. But he does not name any composers and these may have been traditional folk songs. LECTURE NINE The Lyric Age of Greece (Archaic Age) was a time of rapid social, artistic, and economic development. Colonization spread and there was the development of new forms of government. Tyrants such as Polykrates of Samos and Hipparchos of Athens became notable arts patrons. Poets came from all over the Greek world: Sappho from Lesbos, Archilochus from the Cyclades, Tyrtaeus from Sparta, Anacreon from the Ionian Asia Minor, and Pindar from Boeotia. Their poetry encompasses the full range of human emotions, life and death, warfare, government, love (heterosexual and homosexual), wealth, old age, heroes, and mythology and the gods. 40 Lyric poems were composed for performance: symposia, private parties, and civic and religious festivals. The purpose of lyric poetry was varied. It was for entertainment, teaching the young, scorning enemies, promoting the state, celebrating sporting events, and eulogizing the dead. Forms of Lyric Poetry Lyric poetry was accompanied by the lyre (lyra) or was sung (melic). A wide variety of metrical forms involving the alternation of long and short syllables was used. English verse tends to be based on syllabic stress, not length, making Greek lyric very difficult to capture in translation. There are four forms of lyric poetry. Monodic. Solo, such as the works of Alcaeaus, Sappho, and Anacreaon, who composed poems for a small group of friends. This form is usually written in a native dialect, Aeolic for Sappho, and it tends to use short and metrically simple stanza forms called strophes. Choral. Poems for public performance sung and danced by a choir. These tended to be sacred public performances of hymns, paeans to Apollo, the dithyramb to Dionysos, parthenia (maiden songs), and the threnos (funeral dirge). These often employed the international style of Doric dialect with longer and more complex strophic forms known as triads: strophe— antistrophe—epode. This verse form may represent the dance moves of the chorus. Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, and Pindar wrote choral poems. Secular Choral. Praise songs for rulers and erotic love poems (encomia), and victory songs for athletes (epinikia). Simonides, Bacchylides, and Pindar wrote these. Elegy. From the term elegos—sung lament. This refers to the metrical form, a two-line unit called the elegiac couplet, a line of dactylic hexameter (the six-beat line of Homer) followed by a shorter line of two half hexameters. This was a popular verse form used for all kinds of subjects and on inscriptions on graves and other monuments (called epigram). This was practiced by poets such as Archillochus, Callinus, and Tyrtaeus. Transmission Apart from four books of Pindar’s victory odes and elegies of Theogonis of Megara, the only scraps of lyric poetry that survive come down to us from quotations via later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch; later Hellenistic and Roman texts; or via damaged scrolls of papyrus from Egypt. Oxyrhynchus on the west bank of the Nile has produced fragments by Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Pindar, and Archilochus. Sappho Sappho, the famous female poet from the Island of Lesbos, was known as the tenth muse in antiquity. The Alexandrian scholars collected her poetry into nine volumes, but only one complete poem and scattered fragments survive. Sappho was born in the city of Mytilene on the Island of Lesbos around 600 BCE. We know hardly anything at all about the details of her life. Her poetry 41 seems to refer to a brother and perhaps a daughter. She may have spent some time in exile as a result of her or her family’s involvement in the factional politics of the island. Her main theme was erotic love as experienced by a close group of female friends. We also have a number of fragments of wedding songs. Sappho’s sexuality has long been debated. Many of the fragments we have sing of the love of women as well as men. One theory is that Sappho was composing for a group of women before they were married or that she herself was articulating her private passions. Her home of Lesbos was the basis of the term “lesbian.” But the realities of Sappho’s own love-life matter little in the face of the sheer promise and beauty of the surviving fragments. Archilochus Archilochus was born on Paros in the Cyclades in the late seventh century BCE and moved to Thasos when Paros colonized the island. He served as a soldier and fought with Thracian tribes. Little is known about him other than that his name means something like “master sergeant.” Archilochus’s characters may also be poetic archetypes such as Neoboule (she who makes new plans) and Glaucos (grey eyes). Archilochus composed iambic and elegiac poetry and was famous for his caustic wit and spiteful, slanderous tone, although he was also capable of great beauty. It seems that nothing was taboo for Archilochus, from admitting that he dropped his shield and fled from the battlefield to confessing his sexual escapades with a wide variety of partners. Archilochus was one of the earliest exponents of the iambic tradition of bawdy verse, although the form may have had its origins in Asia Minor and at ancient fertility festivals and ribald public gatherings. Aristotle writes that the iambic form of poetry was the closest to the Greek cadence of natural speech, and so this form suited bawdy invective and went on to become the dominant form of Athenian tragedy and comedy. Tyrtaeus A Spartan of the mid-seventh century BCE, Tyrtaeus may have written a poem on the constitution of Sparta (Law and Order). Plutarch has the Spartan king Leonidas say that Tyrtaeus’s poetry inspired young Spartans to the point where they stopped fearing for themselves in battle. Tyrtaeus was known for war poetry celebrating Spartan warriors. He is connected to the second Messenian war (660–640 BCE) that began as a helot uprising of the Messenians, who had been conquered by the Spartans in 730 BCE. He is known primarily for writing “gnomic” or wisdom verses. LECTURE NINE Anacreon Born in Teos, a city on the western coast of Asia Minor around 570 BCE, Anacreon served the court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos. After his death around 520, Anacreon was brought to Athens by Hipparchos, the younger brother of the tyrant Hippias. His favorite themes were wine and love, both heterosexual and homosexual. 42 A superb wordsmith and master of poetic wit, Anacreon would stretch Greek to investigate every aspect of the linguistic form. I’m in love with Cleobolus. I’m mad for Cleobolus. I’m agog at Cleobolus. (fragment 359, trans. Barbara Hughes Fowler) English can’t do this fine little poem full justice as the name of the object of desire is declined in the genitive (Kleoboulou), the dative (Kleobuloi), and finally the accusative (Kleobulon). It is as if every way in which the lover’s name can be conjured amplifies the emotion. It is sheer beauty and simplicity. It was this linguistic dexterity that afforded Anacreon much of his later renown, and the Alexandrians compiled six volumes of his poetry. These witty poems inspired imitators. A collection of sixty-two poems were believed to be by Anacreon until the nineteenth century. These works have become collectively known as the Anacreontea. They are composed in metres found in Anacreon’s original works and also mainly deal with wine and love. These poems by a variety of authors from the first century BCE to the fifth or sixth centuries CE had a huge influence on European lyric poetry. Pindar (518–438 BCE) Born in Kynoskephalai, near Thebes, Pindar, so we are told, studied music as a youth in Athens. He had his first commission to compose a victory ode (Pythian 10) at the age of twenty. His last poem can be dated to around 446, a career spanning fifty years. Alexandrian scholars collected seventeen volumes of hymns, paeans, dithyrambs, victory odes, maiden songs, and encomia (praise songs). Only four books of the victory odes (epinician) have survived. Arranged according to the games for which they were written, they are as follows: Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian. The families of victors would commission a poem to celebrate an athletic victory. These epinicians usually comprise three content areas: information about the victor and his family, stories of myth and legend, and maxims on the human condition. Structure Generally, Pindar’s poems were composed in triads—three verses or stanzas: strope, antistophe, and epode. Some odes have a series of identical stanzas called monostrophic. Pindar deploys a wealth of rhetorical tools and develops highly sophisticated metaphors that have given his poetry a reputation for density and elitism. His mythological allusions can seem obscure to us, but would have been directly relevant as clever poetic allusions to his patrons and his audience. 43 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. What role did paternal violence and attitude toward the female play in Hesiod’s account of the creation myth and succession of the gods? 2. How did Greek lyric poetry influence Athenian tragedy and later European poets? Suggested Reading Hesiod. Works and Days and Theogony. New ed. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1993. Miller, Andrew W. Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1996. Other Books of Interest Lefkowitz, Mary R. The Lives of the Greek Poets. London: Duckworth Publishers, 1983. Pindar. The Odes of Pindar. 2nd ed. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. Sappho. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Reprint ed. Trans. Anne Carson. New York: Vintage, 2003. LECTURE NINE Schmidt, Michael. The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets. New York: Vintage, 2006. 44 Lecture 10: Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus (Professor Peter Meineck) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. TIMELINE FOR AESCHYLUS Works There are only seven surviving plays of Aeschylus. Altogether, he may have written over ninety. He was said to have won thirteen victories at the Dionysia and competed there nineteen times. We have seven extant plays of Aeschylus (see sidebar). Most scholars now feel that the play Prometheus Bound, originally attributed to Aeschylus, is probably the work of his son Euphorion from around 430 BCE. The Oresteia In 458 BCE, when Aeschylus was sixty-seven years old, he presented one of his greatest works to the demos of Athens seated in the Theatre of Dionysos. This was The Oresteia, the epic story of the curse of the House of Atreus in Argos, the death of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the revenge of Orestes. 525 Birth of Aeschylus 510 Tyrant Hippias expelled from Athens 490 Battle of Marathon; Athens defeats Persia under Darius 484 Aeschylus’s first victory at Dionysia 483 Discovery of silver in Athenian mines at Laurion 480 Battle of Salamis; Athens defeats Persia under Xerxes 477 Establishment of the Delian Confederacy led by Athens 472 The Persians 467 Seven Against Thebes 463? Suppliant Women (written sometime between 466 and 459) 462 Ephialtes strips the Aristocratic Aerepogus Council of power 458 Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, The Furies) 457 Athens completed the long walls between the city and the harbor to defend against Spartan aggression 456 Died in Gela, Sicily The Oresteia is a trilogy: Agamemnon. The story of the homecoming of King Agamemnon from Troy and his death at the hand of his wife Clytemnestra. Libation Bearers. Orestes returns years later and kills Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. The Furies (or Eumenides). Orestes is pursued by the Furies for spilling the blood of his kin and flees to Athens, where an Athenian jury presided over by Athena decide the case. The trilogy was followed by a Satyr play called Proteus. Only around twenty lines survive and it seems the play deals with Menelaus and Helen in Egypt. 45 Proteus was the name of an Egyptian king and a shape-shifting spirit whom Menelaus encountered in Egypt (according to Homer). Agamemnon: Background of Myth The story of the house of Atreus was known at least as far back as the Odyssey, written down in the eighth century BCE. The myth itself probably dates back to at least the beginning of the Dark Ages and would have circulated via the performance of bards. The Curse Atreus the King of Argos was locked in a bitter dispute with his brother Thyestes over the throne. This resulted in the banishment of Thyestes and his family from Argos. But Atreus was not satisfied and feared revenge, so he staged a false religious festival and invited his brother and his family back in an act of mock reconciliation. Thyestes arrives and is seated alone to receive a ritual meal. As he eats, he slowly begins to realize that he is actually eating human flesh, in fact, the remains of his children, who Atreus has had butchered and cooked. Thyestes reels back and curses the House of Atreus and his entire family. The Sons of Atreus The two sons of Atreus were Agamemnon and Menelaus. To the south of Argos lay the Kingdom of Sparta, where a man called Tynadareus once ruled. His wife Leda was impregnated by Zeus disguised as a swan on the same night she lay with her mortal husband. She then gave birth to both mortal and immortal children. The sons Castor and Pollux and the daughters Clytemnestra and Helen. All the best men of Greece wanted to marry the semi-divine and beautiful Helen, and she was eventually married to Menelaus, who went to rule in Sparta with Clytemnestra going to live with Agamemnon in Argos. The Greeks swore to uphold the marriage of Helen and Menelaus, and so when Paris took her to Troy, they were honor bound to follow Agamemnon and Menelaus into the Trojan War. The Sacrifice of Iphigenia LECTURE TEN Under the leadership of Agamemnon, Menelaus’s older and more powerful brother, the Greeks gather their ships at the harbor off Calchis in the bay of Aulis. A terrible storm prevents them from sailing and the prophet Calchas interprets an omen of two eagles tearing at a pregnant hare. The Greek soldiers are becoming weak and are starving. Their commanders demand a sacrifice to mollify Artemis, the goddess of the hunt. Agamemnon understands that this must be his daughter Iphigenia and resigns himself to her death. Fair winds follow, and the Greeks sail on to Troy. The Trojan War After a siege that lasted over ten years and claimed the lives of many Greek heroes and soldiers, the Greeks sack Troy, smashing sacred shrines and desecrating altars to the gods. As they sail home, the angry gods send a terrible storm, scattering the fleet and isolating Agamemnon’s ship. 46 The Watchman Agamemnon opens at night when a disheveled watchman pops up on the roof of the house of Atreus and shouts “GODS!” at the top of his voice. This was a superb attention-grabbing device for an audience probably gathered at dawn in an open-air theatre with no house lights. The watchman locates himself on the roof of the House of Atreus and if, as many scholars think, this was the first time a skene (scene building) has been used, his appearance would have significant dramatic effect. Here the watchman articulates the natural order of the stars in the night sky, the male realm of Zeus. Soon he will see Clytemnestra’s beacon sent from Troy, a woman-made constellation usurping the natural order—and one of the main themes of the Oresteia is firmly established—the conflict between male and female. The Chorus The Chorus of Agamemnon is made up of twelve old men of Argos. Aeschylus is not clear who exactly they are. At times they seem to act like ministers of state or local leaders. At others they represent the stagnation in Argos, the loss of young men and a sense of powerlessness. The Chorus sings of the expedition against Troy as being a war to preserve the divine laws of hospitality presided over by Zeus. But their vaunted words are tinged with a sense of loss. They bring up the sacrifice of Iphigenia and here Aeschylus shows us an Agamemnon wrestling with this grave decision between family and state. Under pressure from the chiefs to avert a terrible storm that is blasting the fleet and starving the troops, he makes the decision to sacrifice his daughter to appease Artemis and calm the winds. The Beacon Speech Clytemnestra enters through the doorway of the skene, representing the great doors of the house of Atreus. Note Aeschylus’s expert use of entrances and exits. She tells the men of the chorus that Troy has been taken; they are bewildered. How can she possibly know? She tells them of her chain of beacons that sent a signal fire from Troy. Each stage is imbued with mythological power. After another choral ode that tells of Helen and the justice of Zeus, a messenger from the Greek army arrives, bringing the news that Agamemnon has returned. He also tells the chorus that Menelaus is lost at sea and so far only one ship has returned home. Clytemnestra tells the messenger to go back to Agamemnon and have him come as quickly as possible to find a “faithful” wife. The Return of Agamemnon Agamemnon arrives in a chariot, breaking up a choral ode. He thanks Zeus for his victory and talks of reestablishing order in Argos. He goes to step from the chariot and enter his house, but his way is blocked by Clytemnestra. 47 Clytemnestra heaps praise upon her husband and tells of how hard her life has been while he has been away. She orders the women of the house to lay the finest crimson tapestries from the door to his chariot. Agamemnon knows how bad it will look if he treads on the cloths and at first refuses, but in an expert subtextual duel, Clytemnestra persuades him. After taking off his boots, he walks up the carpet into his house, his feet never actually touching his native earth, in stark contrast to the arrival of the messenger. Before he exits, Agamemnon introduces Cassandra, his Trojan war-prize, and orders her taken into the house to serve him. Cassandra is a daughter of King Priam and a prophetess of Apollo. She carried the curse that no one would ever believe her prophecies. Cassandra Cassandra sings terrible prophecies about the death of Agamemnon, but the chorus will not listen. She curses her fate and rejects Apollo. She knows she is going to be killed by Clytemnestra and foresees the return of Orestes, but she walks through the door accepting her death. Clytemnestra’s Revenge The Chorus’s next ode is suddenly interrupted by the terrifying sound of the screams of Agamemnon, who is struck down in the bath at the hands of his own wife. The Chorus are confused and break into twelve separate voices, squabbling over the best course of action. When they finally resolve to rush the house, they are too late. The great doors open and Clytemnestra emerges, standing over the dead bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. The Chorus is shocked, appalled, and confused. Clytemnestra says she is the spirit of vengeance. The Chorus laments their dead king and Clytemnestra refuses to let them bury him. She invokes the law of justice and claims to be an agent of revenge. She claims she has paid for his crimes “deed for deed.” LECTURE TEN Aegisthus Aegisthus enters with several guards (note that Aeschylus has him come from offstage). He did not participate in the murder, only the conspiracy. This differs from the account found in Homer’s Odyssey and our records of the mythic tradition. This device on the part of Aeschylus places the blame for Agamemnon’s death squarely on the shoulders of Clytemnestra—a mother avenging her slaughtered daughter and defending what’s left of her family. Or is she a scheming faithless wife plotting to take power and overthrow her husband who never loved her? Aegisthus tells of how Atreus fed his siblings to his father and how he is claiming rightful revenge. He stands at the side of Clytemnestra and is challenged by the Chorus. They pray for the return of Orestes, the son of Agamemnon who has been sent away. Aegisthus’s response is to order his henchmen to silence them, but Clytemnestra intervenes and calls for an end to hostilities. Libation Bearers Orestes, the exiled son of Agamemnon and Pylades, his friend from Phocis, enter at the tomb of Agamemnon in Argos. This may have been located at 48 the altar to Dionysos in the center of the Orchestra. Orestes prays to Hermes as he lays a lock of his hair at his father’s tomb. A Chorus of mourning women enters, sent by Clytemnestra to pour water to assuage the restless spirit of Agamemnon. She has been having terrible, unsettling dreams. Orestes and Pylades hide to watch the ritual. Electra, Orestes’ sister, leads the women. She does not know whether to pour the libations or throw them away. The Chorus tells her to perform the rites, not for Clytemnestra, but in the name of those loyal to her father. Electra sees the lock of hair and imagines that it could be her exiled brother’s. She sees footprints that seem like his. She becomes increasingly excited until Orestes reveals himself and proves that he is her brother by producing a piece of woven tapestry that was placed in his crib when he was an infant. Orestes tells his sister that Apollo has sent him to claim his birthright and avenge the death of his father. He speaks of being afflicted with terrible ailments if he does not do the god’s will. The chorus sings a funeral lament and is joined by Electra and Orestes. This type of keening would have grown from a mournful dirge to a disturbing aggressive chant designed to provoke action, in this case revenge for the murdered man. There is strong historical evidence that these kind of womenled funerals had been recently banned in Athens. This may have been a result of controlling women’s voices when Athenian men had been killed in battle serving the State. This epic concentric song pushes Orestes and Electra into action. Orestes learns of Clytemnestra’s dream. It seems like a prophecy affirming what he is about to do. She dreamt that a serpent was suckling at her breast and that her milk was infused with blood. Orestes devises a plan to disguise him and Pylades as strangers looking for shelter from the night. A covert, nighttime attack is typical for a young male initiate and here we are reminded that what Orestes intends to do is a mythological metaphor for the rite of passage from boy to man. Orestes goes to the great door of the house of Atreus and asks the doorman to fetch the head of the household. Aeschylus still creates a sense of gender conflict in the trilogy by having Clytemnestra, not Aegisthus, appear. Orestes claims to be a traveler seeking shelter and Clytemnestra speaks of the excellent hospitality of the house. He tells his mother that her son is dead and that he has been given the ashes to return to Argos. Clytemnestra is distraught at the news of the death of her son and retires into the house, inviting her “guests” inside. The nurse Cilissa appears and tells how she nursed and raised the young Odysseus. She is dispatched to fetch Aegisthus. Aegisthus is delighted to hear the news of the death of Orestes. He believes that there will then be no one left to avenge Agamemnon. He goes inside to hear the news directly from Clytemnestra. The great doors close and soon enough we hear his screams from the house as he is killed offstage in a reflection of the killing of Agamemnon. The doors open and Clytemnestra emerges, calling for her “man-killing ax.” 49 Orestes confronts his mother and makes her face the fact that he has killed Aegisthus. He says that she is next. Clytemnestra desperately appeals to him for mercy. In stark contrast to what we had previously heard from the nurse, she talks of a mother’s love and bears the breast she claims to have weaned him on. Orestes falters and asks his hitherto silent comrade Pylades what he should do. Pylades suddenly speaks in one of the earliest uses of the third actor, and reminds Orestes of the oracle of Apollo. He must avenge his father and kill his mother or suffer terrible consequences. Orestes steels himself to the grizzly task and leads his mother back into the house. When the doors open again, Orestes enters on the ekkyklema with the dead body of his mother, again reflecting the Agamemnon. Orestes spreads out the net that trapped his father and justifies his actions as rightful vengeance against those who killed his father. Suddenly Orestes sees the Furies, terrifying underworld female spirits that pursue all those who have shed their own family blood. He flees in terror and resolves to go to Apollo’s shrine at Delphi to seek the god’s help. The curse of the House of Atreus continues down through yet another generation and the Chorus asks when it will all end. The Furies (Eumenides) The final play of the Oresteia trilogy opens with a dramatic shift in location. The doors of the skene open and the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, the Pythia, enters. She begins her sacred ritual by detailing the genealogy of the sanctuary, beginning with Gaia, the earth, down through a secession of powerful female spirits through her master, the god Apollo, who now presides over the shrine. She solemnly enters the doorway, which has now been described as the temple of Apollo at Delphi, only to reenter suddenly on all fours, screaming and howling in terror. She has seen Orestes at the center-stone of Delphi covered in blood, surrounded by the sleeping Furies. She calls for the god Apollo to come and purge his house of this foul miasma—a stain, something impious and unclean. Orestes enters and is met by Apollo, who tells him to flee to Athens and beg Athena to help him. LECTURE TEN Apollo and the Furies argue over the rights of the case and their respective arguments are laid out. The Furies punish crimes against kindred blood and so must pursue Orestes. They do not recognize the relationship between a husband and a wife. This is a nomos, a man-made custom, and not a phusis—a natural law of the universe. It is then the themis of the Furies to pursue Orestes—their rightful place in the scheme of things. Apollo reacts angrily that the Furies dishonor and demean the whole basis of the Olympian gods, the marriage of Zeus, sky god, with Hera, earth goddess. The Furies reject this view, stating, “You young gods ride roughshod over the old ways!” This creates a cosmic crisis on the very nature of justice. The scene now moves again, this time to the heart of the city of Athens—the statue of Athena before her temple on the Acropolis. Orestes clings to the base of this statue (probably the altar in the center of the orchestra) and begs 50 for Athena’s help. The Furies enter and sing their “binding song,” an incantation that was meant to freeze their quarry in abject terror. Athena enters directly from Troy, where she has claimed the land for Greece. She hears from both the Furies and Orestes and decides that the case is far too important to be settled by either one mortal man or even herself. She knows that she must mollify the Furies or Athens will incur their wrath. She must also be fair to Orestes and so she resolves to hold the first ever jury trial, appointing “the exemplary men of my city as magistrates over murder, bound by a solemn oath, for now and for ever to serve this sacred court.” This new law court is founded on the “Hill of Ares,” the Areopagus, traditionally the site of the camp of the Amazon warrior women when they attacked Athens. This also has a profound political connotation. The democratic reformer Ephialtes had recently reduced the power of the Council of the Areopagus from an aristocratic upper house of government to a homicide court. This controversial move helped to stoke the fires of near civil war in Athens between Aristocratic and Democratic factions, and Ephialtes himself was murdered. Apollo enters to defend Orestes and makes the claim that it is the father’s seed that produces the child, not the mother’s. Here is Aeschylus presenting the Olympian gods as supporting the idea of patriarchy. He claims that a woman is merely a vessel for fostering the male seed and cites Athena as an example of how a child can be produced without a mother. Here the many themes of The Oresteia come together: male versus female, the new ways usurping the old, Chthonic against Olympian, oikos (household) versus polis (city-state), and familial justice versus state law. Athena calls for the votes to be cast and then counted. In our first ever courtroom drama, the vote is split, and so Athena, citing her loyalty to her father, casts in favor of Orestes, who is released and pledges Argive loyalty to Athens. The Furies are incensed and threaten to blight the land of Athens in revenge. Athens tries to persuade them to accept the verdict, but also to be welcomed to a new home. She offers them a revered place in Athens where they will take up residence in the earth and be worshiped by the Athenians. Initially, the Furies reject this compromise, but eventually they are persuaded after Athena goes so far as to threaten them with Zeus’s thunderbolts if they cannot control their rage. The trilogy ends with a great procession through the theatre. The Furies are renamed Eumenides or “kindly ones,” wrapped in red cloaks and led by the procession to their new home in Athens. This scene is reminiscent of the great Panathaniac procession, which took place once every four years in Athens when the people of the city would process onto the Acropolis to dress the ancient wooden cult statue of Athena. Involved in this procession were resident aliens of Athens, foreign-born men who worked in the city and paid taxes but could not vote. These were called metics and this arrangement in Athenian society allowed the city to accommodate skilled artists and craftsmen from all over the Greek world. 51 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How does Aeschylus use visual elements in staging The Oresteia? 2. How is the motif of gender conflict used in The Oresteia? Suggested Reading Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Trans. Peter Meineck. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1988. Other Books of Interest Bloom, Harold. Aeschylus: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Chelsea House Publishing, 2001. Gagarin, Michael. Aeschylean Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Goldhill, Simon. Aeschylus: The Oresteia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Herrington, C.J. Aeschylus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Sommerstein, A.H. Aeschylean Tragedy. Levante, 1996. Websites to Visit LECTURE TEN The Perseus Digital Library — www.perseus.tufts.edu 52 Lecture 11: Greek Tragedy: Sophocles (Professor Peter Meineck) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Sophocles’ Theban Plays (trans. Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff). TIMELINE FOR SOPHOCLES 500 Birth of Sophocles 490 Battle of Marathon 480 Battle of Salamis 468 First victory at Dionysia with Triptolemus (lost) 461 Democratic reforms of Ephialtes 447 Parthenon begun in Athens 443 Head of the Athenian Treasury 442 Antigone 440 Held Athenian Generalship 440s Ajax 431 Start of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta 430 Oedipus Tyrannus 429 Death of Pericles 420 –10 Electra 425 Trachinian Women (may be earlier ca. 450) 416–13 Athenian Expedition to Sicily 413 Special Government Commissioner 409 Philoctetes 406 Death of Sophocles 405–04 Defeat of Athens by Sparta 404–03 Rule of Thirty Tyrants in Athens 401 Oedipus at Colonus Life and Times Sophocles was born in a small village just north of Athens called Colonus at the beginning of the fifth century BCE. His first known performance was in 468 BCE where he defeated Aeschylus at the City Dionysia. He was said to have created more than 120 works and won twenty victories, eighteen at the City Dionysia. Sophocles dominated the fifth century in a spectacular career that did not end with his death in 406. His last play, Oedipus at Colonus, was produced in 401 BCE by his grandson, also called Sophocles. Like most dramatists of his day, he was also an actor, but retired early because of poor vocal range. He then wrote for an actor named Tlepolemus and created many of his most famous roles for him. Ancient writers called Sophocles “The Bee” for his honeyed words. He was praised for his excellent use of dramatic timing, theatrical innovations such as the third actor, use of the chorus, a focus on the human condition, and the use of intricate language. Aristotle championed Sophocles as the finest example of a tragic dramatist and held up Oedipus Tyrannus as the very finest of all Greek tragedies. One tantalizing legend surrounding Sophocles says that he was responsible 53 for instituting the cult of the healer god Aesclepius at Athens and that in death he became the hero Dexion as a reward. Sophocles was also politically active, serving as head of the Athenian treasury, an elected general, and a special commissioner after the failure of the Sicilian expedition in 413. Antigone Antigone is now perhaps Sophocles’ most widely read play. After the war of the Seven Against Thebes, Antigone vows to bury both her brothers, her duty as her nearest kin. However, her uncle Creon, Thebes’ ruler, has banned the funeral of Polynices as an enemy of the state. His body is to lie exposed and unburied outside the city walls as a warning to all others who would turn traitor against their city. Antigone defies the laws of Creon, citing an older familial right and forces her uncle to bring down the laws of the state upon her. Forced to show his hand, Creon entombs Antigone even though she is betrothed to his son. But Creon relents when bad omens make him realize that the unburied corpse is polluting the city. When he opens the tomb, it is already too late and Antigone is dead, having hung herself rather than starve to death. Creon’s son kills himself in pain at the loss of his love and Creon’s wife takes her own life, cursing her husband as a child-killer. Creon preserves the rule of law, but loses his loved ones in doing so. Oedipus Tyrannus Perhaps the most famous of all Greek tragedies, primarily because in the fourth century BCE it was held by Aristotle in his Poetics to be a paragon of tragedy and then in the twentieth century CE to have entered the psychoanalytical vocabulary of Sigmund Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams. The Title of the Play The play’s title has caused confusion over the years and sometimes led to a misreading of the work. In Latin, it has been called Oedipus Rex, which has become translated as Oedipus the King. But Oedipus is not a king in the Greek sense and the term “tyrant” did not necessarily have the same kind of negative connotations that it does today. In ancient Greece, a tyrannus was a sole leader who ruled by popular consent. For much of the sixth century BCE, Athens had been ruled by the tyrant Piesistratus and his sons, and many Greek city-states in the fifth century were still led by tyrants. LECTURE ELEVEN The Historical Background We cannot be certain of the exact date of Oedipus Tyrannus. It is usually dated sometime between 430 and 425 BCE. In 431 BCE, the Peloponnesian War broke out between Athens and Sparta, rival powers for hegemony over the Greeks. The Spartans had by far the best infantry fighting force in the Greek world and the prominent Athenian leader at that time, Pericles, knew he could not defeat them on land. But Athens possessed a great navy, whereas Sparta did not, and so Pericles derived a radical defensive policy designed to survive a Spartan invasion. Two parallel walls running between the city of Athens and her port of Piraeus seven miles away were constructed, forming a defensive shield 54 around the city and her all-important harbor. These “Long Walls” were designed to keep the Spartans from taking the city or interfering with Athens’s naval operations. During the summer campaigning season, Pericles called for the entire population of Attica to live between the walls in what must have been a vast Athenian shantytown. For a while the policy seemed to work. The Spartans came and went and the Athenian fleet could raid with impunity. But in 430, a plague broke out in Athens because of the overcrowding and decimated the population. Pericles was removed from office in 429, but was restored soon after, only to die of the plague himself. The Main Events of the Play It cannot be a coincidence that Oedipus Tyrannus opens with the news that the people of Thebes are suffering a terrible plague. Everyone in the audience at that time would have firsthand experience of the devastating effect of such a pestilence. Some scholars have even seen a reflection of Pericles in the role of Oedipus. The play opens outside the great doors of the house of Oedipus at Thebes. A crowd has gathered and is begging their leader Oedipus to come to their aid. He defeated a plague once before when the Sphinx besieged the city, and he is just the man to solve this terrible problem again. Oedipus enters and promises to solve the problem. He has already sent his brother-in-law, Creon, to Delphi to ask advice of Apollo’s sacred oracle. Creon arrives and tells Oedipus that the oracle has decreed that the plague has come because the city is harboring the man who murdered the former ruler, Laius. Oedipus swears that he will seek out the defiler and drive him from the city, even if he should reside within his own house. Nothing will stop his manhunt. Oedipus questions the chorus of Theban elders if they know whom this murderer could be and then he furthers his promise by cursing the unknown killer to a life of misery. They tell Oedipus to ask the old blind prophet Tiresias for help. Oedipus replies that he has already summoned him. Tiresias enters, but will not reveal what he knows. Oedipus becomes infuriated with the intransigent old man and accuses him of conspiring with Creon against him. Tiresias calls Oedipus blind and says, “Your ears and your mind are as blind as your eyes.” He spits out the truth at Oedipus and tells him that he has married his mother and foretells that he too will be blind and wander as an exile. Tiresias makes his exit and Oedipus storms back into his house. The old men are confused and frightened, but they resolve to have proof before accepting the rantings of Tiresias. Creon enters, having heard that Oedipus thinks him a conspirator. Oedipus emerges and the two men angrily argue until Oedipus’s wife Jocasta intervenes and forces peace between her brother and husband. Jocasta tells Oedipus that Laius received a prophecy that he would be killed by his son, but instead was murdered by a band of thieves at a place where three roads met. She tells Oedipus that Laius had ordered their son exposed to die on a hillside and that the way he died proved that oracles are not to be believed. But Oedipus becomes frightened; he killed a man at a place where three roads met, a man who seemed very like Jocasta’s description of Laius. 55 Oedipus asks his wife if any of Laius’s men survived. Jocasta says she will have the one survivor summoned. Oedipus then tells Jocasta that a young man in Corinth, a stranger, came to the house of his father, the Corinthian ruler Polybus, and after getting drunk blurted out that Oedipus was not Polybus and Merope’s true son. Oedipus’s parents denied the claim but he went to Delphi, driven to find the truth. The oracle foretold that Oedipus would marry his mother and kill his father and in response he fled from Corinth. On his journey, he came to a place where three roads met and was nearly run down by a noble man in a chariot and his entourage. Oedipus admits that he killed the man in recompense for the insult and now he fears that this was Laius. The old men beg Oedipus not to be too hasty and wait to hear from the survivor. Jocasta prepares an offering to Apollo and as she does so a messenger from Corinth arrives with the news that Polybus has died. The people want Oedipus to return and take power. Oedipus hears the news and is elated, but he fears returning home because it was told that he would marry his mother. The messenger intervenes with the news that it would be fine for Oedipus to return to Corinth, as Polybus and Merope were not his real parents. It turns out that he was once a shepherd in the employ of Polybus and received the infant Oedipus from a shepherd from Thebes. Oedipus asks if the chorus know this shepherd and they think it is the same man that Jocasta has already summoned. Jocasta pleads with Oedipus not to go further and to leave the investigation alone. But Oedipus will not be diverted from finding out the truth and Jocasta flees inside the house, distressed and anxious. The old servant of Laius arrives and the Corinthian messenger recognizes him. The old Theban at first denies all knowledge but after being threatened with torture he reveals that he did in fact receive an infant from Jocasta with orders to expose him, but he took pity on the child and gave him instead to the Corinthian. LECTURE ELEVEN Oedipus finally realizes the truth and is mortified. He rushes inside, leaving the chorus to sing of how Oedipus once solved the riddle of the Sphinx and saved Thebes and is now struck down. A messenger tells the chorus that Jocasta has hanged herself and Oedipus took the brooches from her gown and gouged out his own eyes with the long golden pins. Oedipus enters, blinded and in terrible pain. He says he could not bear to look on his children, who are also his siblings. Oedipus begs to be banished from the city, but Creon intervenes and tells Oedipus to go back inside the house. Oedipus’s daughters Antigone and Ismene are allowed a brief moment to see their father before he is forced back inside by Creon. Oedipus exits and the chorus tell the Thebans to mark Oedipus, who was once envied and is now reviled. 56 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How does Sophocles use the motif of sudden realization to enact a tragic reversal of fortune? 2. What is the relevance of fate in the works of Sophocles? Are his heroes trapped by fate or are their actions governed by freedom of choice? Suggested Reading Sophocles. Theban Plays. New ed. Trans. Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 2003. Other Books of Interest Blundell, Mary Whitlock. Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kirkwood, Gordon M. A Study of Sophoclean Drama. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Knox, Bernard M.W. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. ———. Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. Segal, Charles. Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Winnington-Ingram, Reginald P. Sophocles: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. 57 Lecture 12: Greek Tragedy: Euripides (Professor Peter Meineck) The Suggested Readings for this lecture are Euripides’ Medea (trans. Nicholas Ruddell) and Euripides’ Bacchae (trans. Paul Woodruff). In the mid- to late-fifth century, when Euripides was active, he brought a new concentration on dramatic realism, a cynical approach to mythology and a revisionist view of tragedy. Like Sophocles and Aeschylus before him, Euripides was a dramatic innovator, investing his characters with deep psychological insights and questioning social and political mores. LECTURE TWELVE Euripides was born sometime in the 480s in the eastern part of Athens. We know little of his life. He is sometimes lampooned as the son of a greengrocer but he also may have been from an upper middle class family based upon evidence of his boyhood participation in important cult practices in his deme of Phyla. His first play was produced a year after the death of Aeschylus in 455 BCE and he came third and last; he won his first victory in 441 BCE. He was said to have completed over ninety plays, and nineteen plays have come down to us today. The play Rhesus may not be his. The last time he competed in Athens was in 408 with Orestes. He then left for Macedon to the court of King Archelaus and wrote a play named for the king. Euripides died there in 406 while he was working on the Bacchae. 58 TIMELINE FOR EURIPIDES 485–480 480 455 451 441 438 431 432 430 428 427 425 424 423 417 416 414 415 413 414 412 411 409 408 406 405 Birth of Euripides Battle of Salamis Peliades, Euripides’ first play (lost) Pericles passes decree requiring Athenian citizens to have Athenian parents on both sides Euripides’ first victory Alcestis Outbreak of Peloponnesian War Medea Children of Herakles Hippolytus Athenians attach Mytilene Andromache Hecuba The Suppliant Women Electra, Herakles The Athenians sack the citystate of Melos Ion Trojan Women Defeat of Athenian forces at Syracuse Iphigenia in Tauris Helen Oligarchic coup in Athens Phoenician Women, Cyclops Orestes Death of Euripides Bacchae produced in Athens Two important collections of plays by Euripides have come down to us. The first is a set of ten, a kind of dramatic greatest hits collection arranged chronologically that includes Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, Trojan Women, Phoenician Women, Orestes, Bacchae, and the spurious Rhesus. The other manuscript dates back to a pair of fourteenth-century texts that contain nine plays in alphabetical order that may be part of a collection of “complete” works that has since been lost. These are Helen, Electra, Children of Herakles, Herakles, Suppliant Women, Iphigenia at Aulis, Iphigenia in Taurus, Ion, and Cyclops. Medea: The Mythic Background Medea was one of the most infamous female characters in Greek mythology. She was primarily known from two mythic stories, Jason and the Argonauts and the arrival of Theseus in Athens. In the Jason myth, she is the daughter of Aeetes, the king of Colchis, a region on the northern or eastern Black Sea coast. Jason comes in search of the legendary Golden Fleece. Under the spell of Aphrodite, Medea falls in love with him. She helps Jason retrieve the fleece, defying her father, and flees with him on board the Argo. She even goes so far as to kill and dismember her brother and drop his remains over the side so her father’s ships will be forced to slow down to retrieve them. After the events described in Euripides’ play, Medea flees to Athens, where she marries the king, Aegeus. When his long-lost son Theseus returns, Medea fears her son will be usurped and that her position will become tenuous, so she convinces Aegeus that Theseus is an imposter and plans to murder him. Just as Aegeus hands Theseus a bowl of poisoned wine, he sees that Theseus is wearing the old sword he had buried years ago. He knocks the bowl out of his hands and father and son are reunited. Medea flees back to Colchis. Euripides’ Medea Euripides presented Medea in 431 BCE, a time of rapid political activity in Athens, as conflict between Athens and Sparta intensified and resulted in the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Corinth, where Medea is set, was an ally of Sparta and had clashed with Athenian forces defending the island of Corycyra (Corfu) in 433, propelling Greece into war and drawing the Spartans to take a position against Athens. Jason and Medea settled in Corinth after their journeys. A Nurse opens the play and retells the myth of the Golden Fleece. She then says that Jason has decided to marry the daughter of the local ruler, Creon, and the Nurse fears what Medea might do. The tutor enters with Medea’s two children and tells the Nurse that Creon plans to banish Medea and the children. The chorus of Corinthian women arrive, having heard the anguished cries of Medea coming from the house. They fear she will commit suicide and hope that she will be calmed. 59 Medea enters and talks to the chorus about the hardships faced by women at the hands of men. She makes them swear they will not reveal what she plans to do to take revenge on Jason. Creon enters personally to supervise her immediate banishment, but Medea persuades him to let her stay for just one more day. Once he leaves, Medea tells the Chorus that she wants to kill Jason, Creon, and his daughter. Now Jason arrives and chastises her for speaking against his new bride and father-in-law. He says that he will ensure that she and the children always have enough, but Medea rejects his offers, naming him a coward and a turncoat, listing all the trials she undertook on his behalf. Jason maintains that she should be glad that he took her from barbarian lands and brought her to Greece. She should be happy he is marrying a high-born woman, for then his children will always be provided for. After a choral ode that muses on the enormous power of Aphrodite, the Athenian king Aegeus arrives. He is on his way home from Delphi after asking the oracle how he might come by an heir. Medea promises to help Aegeus, but only if he will give her sanctuary in Athens. Aegeus agrees. Medea gives her children wedding presents to deliver to the new bride—a poisoned robe and diadem. A messenger arrives to tell of the death of Jason’s bride and Creon, who tried to save her and was also poisoned. Jason storms on stage and bangs on the door of the skene for Medea to “reveal” herself. The audience might fully expect the doors to open and the ekkyklema to roll out, but instead, in a stunning coup de teatre, Euripides flies Medea above the stage in the snake chariot of her grandfather Helios, the sun. Medea has done the unthinkable. She has killed her own children and refuses to even allow Jason to mourn or bury them. She predicts Jason’s death and flies off to Athens, her escape route assured by Aegeus. Jason is beyond despair as Medea and the bodies of his children escape him. The Bacchae LECTURE TWELVE Dionysos comes home to Thebes, where he was born, to found a new center of worship and take revenge on those who still refuse to recognize that he is a god. Dionysos’s mother was the Theban queen Semele, wife of Cadmus. Zeus had an affair with her and she became pregnant with Dionysos (son of Zeus). Hera tricks Semele into asking Zeus to appear to her, which Zeus at first refused, but as he has sworn an oath, he must, and she is burned to a crisp at his divine countenance. Dionysos is rescued and placed into the thigh of Zeus, where he comes to term and is born, but his family cover up the affair and have it that Semele was struck by lightning and refuse to have anything to do with the new god, saying that the child died with her. Dionysos returns disguised as one of his own priests with a band of followers, the ecstatic revelers called the Bacchants. Pentheus, the young grandson of Cadmus, is now king and he refuses to accept the new god. Both Cadmus and the seer Tiresias have joined the followers of Dionysos, as have Semele’s sisters, including Pentheus’s own mother Agave. They have gathered on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron, where they engage in ecstatic secret rites. 60 Pentheus understands the societal danger of this new orgiastic cult and orders his troops to break up the reveling and arrest the strange priest. Dionysos allows himself to be captured. Pentheus soon realizes that it is impossible to keep this stranger in chains or inflict any harm on him. He tries to bind him, but instead ties up a bull. He tries to run him through, but finds not flesh but air. There is an earthquake and the palace bursts into flames. Dionysos then tries to persuade Pentheus to join his new cult, but Pentheus refuses. Then a drover arrives and tells how he saw the women feasting on milk and honey, but when they saw him they set on him and fell on his cattle, tearing them apart. He barely escaped with his life. He tells Pentheus that he saw his mother Agave with these frenzied women. Pentheus is shocked, but also titillated, and just at the point of sending his army to round up the Bacchants, Dionysos offers Pentheus the chance to witness the rites in secret so nobody would ever know. The young king cannot resist his curiosity and agrees to be dressed as a woman and to go to Mount Cithaeron. Pentheus becomes lustful, arrogant, and vain. As he approaches the grove, he climbs a tree for a better vantage point. Dionysos obliges by bending a tree down and placing Pentheus within the branches. The Bacchants see him and Dionysos tells them to attack the creature in the tree. The women beat him down and drag him to the ground. Pentheus calls out in vain to his mother, who joins the women tearing, kicking, and punching. Agave returns home to her palace bearing the head of Pentheus, thinking she has killed a mountain lion, but Cadmus sees the truth and talks her gently down from her frenzy. When Agave realizes what she has done, she breaks down. Dionysos appears on the mechane (stage-crane) in all his glory. He banishes Agave and says he will turn Cadmus and Harmonia into serpents. The Worship of Dionysos Greek drama has origins in religious worship and ritual practice. In fact, the Athenians were participating in a religious ritual when they attended the theatre. At the City Dionysia they entered the sacred precinct of the god and the theatre was built next to the temple of Dionysos with an altar in the centre of the orchestra. The high priest of Dionysos sat in a place of honor in the front row. The name Dionysos means the “Son of God” and he was born from the thigh of Zeus after his mortal mother was consumed by fire. He was depicted in eastern costume with long, flowing robes, and luxurious hair and beard. He was often surrounded by his followers, the half-man, half-animal Satyrs, and the wild women called the Maenads. Dionysos was the god of wine, revelry, and also of the theatre. In myth, he is the god that encourages mankind to cross social boundaries. His anarchic festive spirit was both revered and feared. The drinking of wine can be said to effect a change of personality, and on that account ritual performance became connected to Dionysos as a god of extreme expression. 61 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. What was the role of women in the works of Euripides? 2. How do the plays of Euripides respond to contemporary events in mid to late fifth-century Athens? Suggested Reading Euripides. Bacchae. Trans. Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1998. ———. Medea. Trans. Nicholas Rudall. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. Other Books of Interest Gregory, Justina. Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians. Reprint ed. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Mossman, Judith, ed. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies; Euripides. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. LECTURE TWELVE Powell, Anton. Euripides, Women and Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1990. 62 Lecture 13: Herodotus of Halicarnassus (Professor Timothy B. Shutt) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is Herodotus’s The Histories (translated by Robin Waterfield). Recovering the Past “Here are presented the results of the enquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks,” with a focus, in particular, on the causes and course “of the hostilities between Greeks and nonGreeks”—what we would call the “Persian Wars.” So begin the Histories of Herodotus, and with them begins the discipline of history as we know it, that is to say, the systematic study of the human past insofar as the past can be recovered for us by means of investigation, inference, and informed surmise. It is not easy for us, well more than two millennia later, to imagine a time without history—a time without access to informed and systematic written accounts of the past. But before Herodotus, so far as we can tell, no such thing really existed. There were chronicles and king-lists, to be sure. And there were myth, poetry, and tradition—epic recollections and reconfigurations of the past. In the Greek-speaking world, above all, there was Homer. But Herodotus is embarked on a different sort of enterprise. He is seeking on the basis of enquiry to make sense of what happened in the recent past and to preserve the results of his findings, and by and large to make sense of what happened in human terms. It was a mode of investigation which would prove very durable and very fruitful. But Herodotus is influential not only as the “father of history.” He was also something very close, long before such a term was invented, to being the first cultural anthropologist. He writes, as he tells us, about both “Greeks and nonGreeks,” or to use his own terms, “Greeks and barbarians.” But unlike most Greeks, who were, by and large, strikingly ethnocentric, Herodotus saw much more in “barbarians” than barbarism, and his painstaking accounts of Egypt and “Scythia,” the steppe-lands of the Ukraine, Southern Russia, and beyond, and above all, of Persia, the Greeks’ great rival in the Persian Wars, are remarkable for their sympathy and, more often than previous generations sometimes supposed, for their accuracy as well. Herodotus at least makes the effort to understand other cultures on their own terms, and if in the end he by and large finds Greek ways the best ways, it is neither unreflectively nor carelessly that he does so. 63 Freedom vs. Slavery And in fact, his long narrative takes the contrast and conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks or “barbarians,” between East and West, Europe and Asia, as his focus, and he sees the roots of the conflict, finally, to speak a bit anachronistically, in something not too far removed from ideological terms. In the contest between the Persian empire, far and away the largest empire the world had yet seen at the time, and the small and disunited Greek poleis or “city-states,” Herodotus saw a contest between autocracy and slavery on the one hand and individual freedom on the other. And more. Not only did the vastly outnumbered Greek poleis, Athens and Sparta and the rest, finally win the contest for their freedom. They in fact won it because they were free, because their freedom was worth fighting for, and inspired them, in the extreme case to fight or die rather than lose it. Or so Herodotus seems to imply. It has proved a resonant and long-enduring paradigm with power to inspire even today. It is not, in the view of Herodotus, that the Greeks were better or more virtuous people. He is too scrupulous and fair-minded to make such a claim as that. It is rather that the Greek way was a better, freer way. And the great Greek fight for freedom against Persia, which reached its climax between 490 and 479, forms the narrative heart of Herodotus’s story. LECTURE THIRTEEN The story comes to first climax at the battle of Marathon, on a tiny Greek coastal plain twenty miles or so northeast of Athens, where in summer of 490 a Persian expeditionary force landed under orders from the Persian Great King Darius to take Athens, in large part, at least putatively, in reprisal for Athens’s support of the trans-Aegean Ionian Greeks in their revolt from Persia a few years before. Most of the Greek poleis had long since made their accommodation with Persian power, but Athens and Sparta, and a few others, had deliberately and provocatively refused to do so. And now the Persians had arrived—and no Greek force had ever defeated them. Accounts differ as to just how many Persians there were—most contemporary scholars would put the figure somewhere between thirty or forty thousand, ancient authorities tend to go quite a bit higher—but however many there were, they vastly outnumbered the Athenians, who understandably sent a runner off to Sparta at top speed to let the Spartans know that help was needed. This was the famous Philippides, in the wonderful Greek phrase, a professional “all-day-runner,” who in high summer heat made the 140 miles to Sparta in less than two days. He was told by the Spartans that they would set out as soon as religious scruple permitted (which they did), and then Philippides ran back to inform the Athenians of the result. That left the Athenians, eight thousand strong, more or less, on their own, save for the help of small nearby Plataea, which contributed one thousand or so more. Against all odds, though, the Athenians were victorious, and by some accounts sent Philippides himself back to Athens (in the first marathon run, the original 1896 Olympic course was set up to commemorate the feat) in order to announce the victory, which he did with his last exhausted breath. Shortly thereafter, the Spartans arrived according to promise. After a fast forced march of their own, they went on to Marathon to approve the Athenians’ fine work, and then went home. For Athens, though, the event 64 was utterly galvanic and led to a burst of cultural self-confidence and exuberant achievement that in a profound sense lives among us still. For the next fifty or sixty years, Greek culture in general and Athenian culture in particular—in sculpture, in architecture, in drama, in politics, and a bit later, in philosophy, and indeed, in history—laid the groundwork for much of what we think of as Western thought and art, and beyond that provided masterworks that are to this day unsurpassed. If we can beat the Persians, we can do anything—something like that seems to have been the spirit. And something like that is what they did. The Pass of Thermopylae The Persians, however, were not going to let the defeat of an expeditionary force, however substantial, stand as a rebuke to their might and an invitation to insurrection empire-wide. And ten years later they came again, and in vastly greater numbers, led this time not by high-level royal functionaries and relatives, but by the new Great King himself, Darius’s son Xerxes. Xerxes spent years gathering forces from one end of the empire to the other, not only from the Persian heartland in what is now Iran, but from what is now Turkey, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond. Modern commentators have a hard time making sense of ancient accounts of the size of his forces—Herodotus claims that they numbered in the millions (5,283,220 all told, to be precise)— but whatever the exact figure, the army was immense, by an order of magnitude the largest host ever yet gathered, an unimaginable sea of armed men, with corresponding numbers of warships and transports in support, four thousand or so all told. The Greek coalition, led once again by Athens and Sparta, was terrified but resolute, and decided in the first case on a sort of defense in depth. They would engage the Persians as far north as they could from the Greek heartland and from Athens and Sparta themselves. They accordingly sent a holding force led by the Spartan king (one of two, as a matter of fact, by strange Spartan custom) Leonidas to the pass of Thermopylae, at that time, so we are told, only a cart-track wide at its narrowest point, with mountains on one side and a drop-off to the sea on the other, and meanwhile sent a combined, though largely Athenian fleet, to the nearby cape of Artemesium to hold off the Persian fleet. The battles at Artemesium proved indecisive, though the Persians lost many of their ships to bad weather—ancient warships were spectacularly unseaworthy and ordinarily fought only close to shore and then only in relatively calm weather. The battle of Thermopylae, though, proved paradoxically to be the utter defeat that led to victory. At first Xerxes couldn’t believe that the laughably small holding force in front of him meant to contest his passage. Beyond the three hundred picked Spartans with Leonidas and their retainers, there were odd assorted other troops, most notably Thespians and Thebans, but on the most optimistic conceivable assessment, they were outnumbered many hundreds, if not many thousands, to one. But contest it they did, and for the first two days successfully inflicting, in the confines of the pass, wildly disproportionate casualties 65 on even Xerxes’ elite troops. (Greek “hoplites,” or heavy infantry, were heavily armed and in Sparta at least trained from childhood for disciplined, close-in fighting. Even the best Persian troops were lightly armored, and Persia’s strong suits were cavalry, useless in the pass, and archery, not very useful as a mode of hand-to-hand combat.) Because, so we are told, of a local who informed Xerxes of a track that would flank the position, Xerxes was at last able to surround the holding force, and when Leonidas learned as much, most of the troops either left or were sent home. The Spartans, however, and the Thespians and some Thebans remained to the last and fought to the last. The pass was forced, but the point was made. Or rather, at least two points were made. First, this time the Greeks—Spartans, Athenians, Corinthians, and the rest alike—were in it together. Thermopylae was a long way from Sparta. But there the Spartans were—and there they stayed, to the last man. And second, in terms of skill, in terms of ferocity, and in terms of determination, Xerxes had never seen soldiers like these. Nonetheless, no organized resistance remained between Xerxes and Athens, and to Athens, accordingly, he went, took the city, sacked it, and burned it. The Athenians, though, had meanwhile evacuated and concentrated their forces—for the most part naval forces—on the offshore island of Salamis, with the rest of the combined Greek fleet, trusting to the leadership of their brilliant, and brilliantly unscrupulous, leader Themistocles, and to the “wooden walls” of the warships that, on his interpretation of the response of the famed Delphic Oracle to Athens’s peril, would prove the salvation of Athens, and, indeed, of Greece. And so they did. According to Herodotus, Themistocles, unable to persuade his allies to stay to support the Athenian fleet at Salamis, tricked Xerxes into attacking before they could flee, and so provoked a fight in the narrows between Salamis and the mainland in which Xerxes’ fleet could not deploy its superior numbers effectively. The result was a resounding Greek—and largely Athenian—victory. LECTURE THIRTEEN Xerxes shortly thereafter retired, but not without leaving a substantial land force behind to finish the task that he had left uncompleted. These troops, however, were defeated the following summer by a coalition army led by Pausanias of Sparta, and with that defeat the central phase of Persian Wars concluded with a Greek victory that proved decisive in the sense that neither Sparta nor Athens was ever again directly threatened with Persian conquest. The Persian Wars were decisive in another sense as well, though, and one that in many respects has proved further-reaching and longer-lasting. For the Persian Wars in general and Herodotus in particular mark the beginning not only of a pan-Hellenic or “all-Greek” self-consciousness, but the beginning of a distinctively Western self-consciousness as well, and that, for good or ill, or perhaps for both, is very much with us still. 66 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. Why could Herodotus be termed the first cultural anthropologist? 2. What were the long-lasting effects of the Persian wars? Suggested Reading Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Other Books of Interest Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin, 2003. 67 Lecture 14: Greek Art (Professor Kim J. Hartswick) The Suggested Reading for this lecture is John G. Pedley’s Greek Art and Archaeology. Clay Vessels and the Geometric Period The year 1000 BCE, after the end of the Bronze Age, is a good starting date to begin the study of Greek art, which includes primarily architecture, sculpture, and painting. Greek art was on the whole religious and public in content and display. Artwork in sanctuaries served equally as pious religious offerings and as public statements of political and cultural power. The first substantial appearance of objects that point to a new cultural identity, or at least the reemergence of a cultural identity for the Greeks is rather pedestrian: clay vessels decorated with simple black geometric designs. A fast potter’s wheel allowed for refined, taut profiles, and a compass was used to form uniform concentric circles. So technical advancements prompted different and better shapes in decoration. This period, designated as the Geometric Period, lasted for at least two hundred years, and the final geometric vessels produced in the middle of the eighth century are true masterpieces of potting and painting. They stand some five feet or more tall and were decorated not only with elaborate geometric designs, but also with human and animal figures, all in silhouette. The shapes, though naïve, effectively convey human and animal forms, and their employment in funerary scenes express a powerful narrative of loss and commemoration. These geometric vessels are indeed representative of the Greek desire for a good narrative, and their appearance in Athens points to this city as an important artistic center. Looking Beyond Their Borders LECTURE FOURTEEN The middle of the eighth century was an important time for the Greek world. The year 776 BCE is thought to be when the Olympic games began, and these games illustrate the competitive nature of the Greeks. This is also the beginning of the Greek colonization of the West. The Greeks were looking beyond their borders and engaging in writing, which had not been part of the Greek world for almost three hundred years. Finally, the great epic poet Homer lived sometime in the eighth century, so the period is a watershed time for Greece and its culture. Corinthian Pottery and the New Athenian Vessels Soon after this period, Corinth established a pottery industry. The Corinthian vessels were quite different from the earlier geometric vessels. They were 68 smaller and held unguents (perfumes), and there was a new technology for producing musculature and even facial features in the human and non-human figures depicted. They also added color (white, primarily, and a purple-red). The subjects were more exotic in nature: lions, griffins, and all sorts of exotic animals created in rows around the vessel. But the Corinthians’ lack of narrative was something the Athenians were quick to pick up on. New Athenian vessels employed the entire surface of the vessel for a simple narrative. There are images of myths tied to Athens and also reflecting the Eastern influence. Because of this Eastern focus, the period is sometimes referred to as the Orientalizing Period. By the seventh century, the Greek world was substantially different from the century earlier. The Greeks traveled more and were confronted by new cultures and artistic traditions. But outside influences never completely dominated, a tribute to the Greeks’ flexibility and ability to absorb and reinterpret outside influences. Greek Sculpture The seventh century is the first time sculptures had been produced from stone and marble since the Bronze Age. Some are less than two feet tall, but others reach almost six feet. The earliest ones are standing female figures usually referred to as korai, meaning maidens. This impulse for making life-size sculptures might have come from Egypt, where the Greeks had witnessed enormous pyramids and sculptures. Large-scale Greek sculptures also began to take the form of the nude male figure, perhaps the most distinctive image that the Greeks ever produced. These nude males are known as kouroi, or youths. They began as life-sized images, but very soon they increased to truly enormous sizes, up to fifteen or twenty feet tall. Symmetry and decoration was the guiding principle, and the figures all seem to be smiling (termed as an expression by scholars the Archaic smile). Indeed, beginning around 600 BCE, the period is termed Archaic. The increase in size of these sculptures and temples occurred at a time Greece was becoming very powerful and more secure about its place in the Mediterranean. It’s also a time when individual city-states were increasing their prestige by building larger and larger temples. Black- and Red-Figure Vessels Athens began to create vessels once again that were large and technically advanced. These vessels were considered to be black-figure vessels, but what distinguished them from earlier vessels was that they featured distinct narratives. Athens at this time was developing a new form of dramatic content for the stage—tragedy—and this transformed the theater in Athens. So there was a relationship between the artwork in Athens and the content on the stage. The year 530 was an important year because rather than having black figures on a neutral background, a decision was made to paint the background rather than the figures, which would stand out as the color of the clay. In 69 Athens, this clay was reddish, so this technique was generally referred to as red-figure technique. The Parthenon and Post-Classical Art Around 510 BCE, Athens changed its idea of government. Rather than rule by tyrants, a constitutional representative government came into being: democracy. Among the achievements of the fifth century, the most visible was that of a great temple dedicated to Athena, the Parthenon. The temple stood atop a hill called the Acropolis and was built between 447 and 432 BCE. Recognized as one of the most important achievements in the Classical world, the temple is, however, typical in terms of its structure. What makes it extraordinary is its details and subtleties. The entire structure is built on a double curved platform whose curvature extends throughout the entire building. The Parthenon thereby appears to surge from the Acropolis rock, and the building is, or was, also almost completely covered by dramatic works of sculpture. This period is the epitome of Classical art, and as such the remaining centuries are considered by some scholars to be poor imitations. But is this true? The following centuries are in fact highly developed. There are exquisitely produced and astonishingly innovative works of art. This is sometimes referred to as the post-Classical period, but in general it is also designated as Hellenistic. The Hellenistic World This was a very different period from the Classical world. It was much more expansive, and there was the idea of individualism and a cosmopolitan outlook—attitudes that were reflected in the artwork of the period. The Hellenistic world was composed of powerful semi-independent citystates under the leadership of royal houses, the successors of Alexander the Great, and the most important of these, artistically speaking, was the city of Pergamon. This was an enormously powerful city by the third century BCE, ruled by a remarkable family called the Atelids. This family attempted to solidify its power through military and cultural conquests. The Atelids built works of art and architecture in their city that reflected or even bettered the architecture found in Athens at the time. LECTURE FOURTEEN The last of the Pergamene kings, Attalos III, died in 133 BCE and willed the city of Pergamon to Rome, thereby indicating a world now dominated by Romans rather than Greeks. Even though Greeks were still working and living in this world, the Greek world was at that time a part of a Roman sphere, and therefore the artwork produced during this period should be left to the Roman world rather than the Greek one. 70 FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING
Questions 1. How did the Greeks’ love for narrative influence their art? 2. What was the difference between black- and red-figure techniques? Suggested Reading Pedley, John G. Greek Art and Archaeology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007. Other Books of Interest Hurwit, Jeffrey M. The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pollitt, Jerome J. Art in the Hellenistic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 71 COURSE MATERIALS Suggested Readings: Aeschylus. The Oresteia. Trans. Peter Meineck. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1988. Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2004. Dalley, Stephanie. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Euripides. Bacchae. Trans. Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1998. ———. Medea. Trans. Nicholas Rudall. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hesiod. Works and Days and Theogony. New ed. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1993. Homer. The Iliad. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Trans. A.T. Murray. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. The Odyssey. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Trans. A.T. Murray. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Miller, Andrew W. Greek Lyric: An Anthology in Translation. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1996. Morris, Ian B., and Barry B. Powell. The Greeks: History, Culture, and Society. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005. Pedley, John G. Greek Art and Archaeology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2007. Sarna, Nahum M. Exploring Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel. New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1996. Soggin, J. Alberto. Introduction to the Old Testament: From Its Origins to the Closing of the Alexandrian Canon. Trans. J. Bowden. 3rd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1980. Sophocles. Theban Plays. New ed. Trans. Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 2003. COURSE MATERIALS Van De Mieroop, Marc. A History of the Ancient Near East: Ca. 3000–323 BC. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004. These books are available online through www.modernscholar.com or by calling Recorded Books at 1-800-636-3399. 72 COURSE MATERIALS Other Books of Interest: Beckman, Gary M., Benjamin R. Foster, and Douglas Frayne, eds. The Epic of Gilgamesh. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. Bloom, Harold. Aeschylus: Comprehensive Research and Study Guide. Chelsea House Publishing, 2001. Blundell, Mary Whitlock. Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Bright, John. A History of Israel. 4th ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000. Flanders, Henry Jackson, Robert W. Crapps, and David A. Smith. People of the Covenant: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Gagarin, Michael. Aeschylean Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Goldhill, Simon. Aeschylus: The Oresteia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Gregory, Justina. Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians. Reprint ed. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Herodotus. The Histories. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin, 2003. Herrington, C.J. Aeschylus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 1990. ———. The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. ———. The Odyssey. 2 vols. 7th ed. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. Hurwit, Jeffrey M. The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kirkwood, Gordon M. A Study of Sophoclean Drama. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Knox, Bernard M.W. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. ———. Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. 73 COURSE MATERIALS Other Books of Interest (continued): Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Lefkowitz, Mary R. The Lives of the Greek Poets. London: Duckworth Publishers, 1983. Martin, Thomas R. Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Mossman, Judith, ed. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Euripides. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pindar. The Odes of Pindar. 2nd ed. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976. Podhoretz, Norman. The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are. New York: Free Press, 2002. Pollitt, Jerome J. Art in the Hellenistic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pomeroy, Sarah B., Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts. Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Powell, Anton. Euripides, Women and Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 1990. Saggs, H.W.F. Civilization Before Greece and Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Sappho. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Reprint ed. Trans. Anne Carson. New York: Vintage, 2003. Schmidt, Michael. The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets. New York: Vintage, 2006. Segal, Charles. Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Shanks, Hershel, ed. Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman Destruction of the Temple. Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1999. Sommerstein, Alan H. Aeschylean Tragedy. Levante, 1996. Winnington-Ingram, Reginald P. Sophocles: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. COURSE MATERIALS These books are available online through www.modernscholar.com or by calling Recorded Books at 1-800-636-3399. 74