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