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The Golden Age of the Greeks
#1
The Golden Age of the Greeks
After scouring through hundreds of ancient documents from Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan, ranging from the middle of the third millennium to the second century B.C.E, there is a progression in the sophistication of literature, in my humble opinion the first essential masterpiece being the Akkadian Ša nagba imuru, otherwise known as The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed around 2,100 B.C.E. (though the tales about Gilgamesh are even older, the Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Agga taking us as far back as the first quarter of the third millennium). At any rate, intertwined with my examination of bronze and iron age myths and epics has been a cursory walk-through of Pericle’s Athens and the literature produced in the era surrounding Greece’s golden age. Bertrand Russell began his exposition on The History of Western Philosophy with the words, “In all history, nothing is so surprising or so difficult to account for as the sudden rise of civilization in Greece. Much of what makes civilization had already existed for thousands of years in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, and had spread thence to neighbouring countries. But certain elements had been lacking until the Greeks supplied them.” [1] Russell is correct, but Friedrich Nietzsche, after comparing the “Greek disciples” with their “teachers from the Orient,” makes the point even better (it must be admitted that Nietzsche is perhaps a bit jaded in his admiration for Greek nobility): “The very reason they got so far is that they knew how to pick up the spear and throw it onward from the point where others had left it. Their skill in the art of fruitful learning was admirable… Whoever concerns himself with the Greeks should ever be mindful that an unrestrained thirst for knowledge for its own sake barbarizes men just as much as a hatred of knowledge. The Greeks themselves, possessed of an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge, controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life.” [2]

While I have only devoured a couple dozen works by Plato, including the tour de force the Republic (known to ancient readership as On Justice), a few plays by Aristophanes (including Clouds and its hilarious depiction of Socrates), Herodotus, and Thucydides (currently reading), the common thread that weaves each of these brilliant texts together is Homer. Greek children were educated primarily on the Homeric epics, memorizing each line from the Iliad and the Odyssey (and a few other selections once thought part of the genuine Homeric archive), and their influence upon later writing abounds in abundance. One would expect Homer to be a force, and my experience of his work bears this out: there is nothing else in ancient literature that I can think to compare them to. On every level, both the Iliad and the Odyssey, though the former slightly more, are superior to any eighth or seventh century composition I have yet to discover, and more remarkably, still tower over other efforts in their contemporary depiction of war (in the Iliad) and the trials of life (in Odysseus’ return from Troy). It is not simply Homer’s ability for metaphor, but it is the complexity of his plots and subplots, his subtlety in building suspense, connecting the brutal language of war with the peaceful and mundane life at home. There’s a reason many Greeks revered Homer as a prophet whom Zeus’ daughters spoke through, his words divine if not at times slightly exaggerated.

Apart from the accidents of history that contributed to the rise of Greek intellectualism---such as the wars with Persia and the subsequent civil wars between Hellenistic city-states that ultimately brought Athens down, or the rise of democratic statesmen such as Pericles who saw the building of many Athenian symbols of power and prestige that still remain today---rigorous study in Homeric poetry appears to me as the biggest stand-alone factor in the gulf separating Greek thought and writing with the rest of the ancient world. Of course, the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Hebrews had some excellent poetry, but nothing with the layers of depth that pervades the very structure of the Greek outlook, and though that is often thought in terms of its philosophy, science, and mathematics, it applies equally to its history and its poetry, the tragedy and the comedy.

What’s the point of all this? If nothing more than a curiosity I’ve taken to consider, at least a plea to read Homer!

1. Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. New York, N.Y: Simon and Schuster, 1972. Print. (pg. 3)
2. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Chicago: Regnery, 1962. Print. pp. 29-31
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza
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#2
RE: The Golden Age of the Greeks
Hear hear!
First of all, kudos to you for this heroic course of study!
By sheer accident I first read the illiad and then some things by plato a coupla years ago, and what struck me was how intimately latter references the former. To me, naively picking up old greek stuff for the first time, it was more or less all the same, a monolith of really old stuff. But after reading first one and then the others, I realized how even to plato, the telling of the illiad was history, and this suddenly made seem plato and his contemporaries much more alive to me, and it created a palpable sense of time and of the people, because in a small way I had a shared reading (or listening) experience with these people living over 2000 years ago. This was helped by plato's dialogue style e.g. in the charming beginning of the monstrous Repulic, which lets you in on a conversation as if you were roving about and sitting at a table listening in on this group of friends. I don't know if that makes any sense.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is a God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
Psalm 14, KJV revised edition

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#3
RE: The Golden Age of the Greeks
I think Russell is right that it is difficult to account for what the Greeks did. And, of course, that what they did was extremely important for civilization.

I think some of it (and this is obviously not original to me) is due to the fact that the Greeks traded and interacted with a variety of different cultures, that got them exposure to different ways of thinking. Not to mention the fact that the Greeks themselves were a collection of city-states, and not a monolithic society. So they had experience with different ways of thinking, and respected different ways of thinking (one finds much admiration of the Egyptians, for example). Also, their polytheistic religion was not mired in dogma that forced everyone to profess the exact same set of beliefs; they had no one text that was regarded as authoritative and sacred, the way the Bible has been viewed by many Christians. It was okay to worship different gods, and focus one's attention on different ones from what someone else was doing. It wasn't a freethinker's paradise, but compared with so many other ancient (as well as more recent) societies, it was far closer to that idea than most.

I think all of those things were contributing factors for the Greeks coming up with new ways of thinking about the world.

"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
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