The Rise of Ancient Greece

Early Aegean civilizations

A. Minoan (mih-NO-un)

Little is known about them. We don’t even know what they called themselves. (An archeologist gave them the name Minoan after the legendary king Minos.) Located on the Island of Crete, the Minoan civilization appeared about 2000 B.C.; it emerged through trading rather than conquest. They seemed to be a very wealthy civilization; they had few weapons so they enjoyed a relative degree of peace; their women dressed elegantly with extensive jewelry and seemed to enjoy a status in society equal to men.

This civilization was destroyed after about 500 years.

B. The Mycenaeans (my-suh-NEE-un)

A civilization on the mainland. They were responsible for destroying the Minoan civilization in about 1550 B.C. They took over the trade routes of their predecessors. They were more warlike than the Minoan civilization.

At the height of their power, some unknown threat caused them to fortify all their cities. Shortly afterwards, they were destroyed.

C. The Trojan War

Troy was a rich trading city in present day Turkey; it controlled the straits into the Black Sea. According to legend, the Trojans kidnapped Helen, the beautiful wife of a Greek king. The Greeks went to war with Troy for 10 years before finally laying waste the city of Troy. (The Trojan Horse)

The Greek Dark Ages (1100-725 B.C.)

A. Doric Invasions

As the Mycenaean civilization collapsed, Greece was invaded and inhabited by people from the North called Dorians. The Dorian invasions destroyed the prosperity and cohesion of Greece. There was a sharp drop in agricultural production and in population. Greek cities became villages, and writing declined and was lost. Large numbers of people left the mainland and sailed to various lands to begin new settlements. Trade between Greece and elsewhere disappeared as the Dorian Greeks had no desire for contact with foreign peoples, believing that beyond them lived only strange people and monsters.

B. Homer

At some point in the 8^th century the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet. This made it much easier to read and write. During this time, at the end of the Dark Ages, Homer put together his masterpieces.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are epic poems (an epic is a long narrative poem that tells the deeds of a great hero) about the Trojan War and its aftermath.

Homer values courage and honor. (More on Homer later.)

Life of the Polis

A. The Polis

The polis became the center of Greek life after abou750 B.C. Superficially, a polis was a city and the surrounding countryside that it controlled. But the Greece polis was more than a city; it was system or way of life; it was a product of the life of its citizens working and living together to produce a community.

The polis had both an urban area and surrounding lands used for farming. Most people lived in these rural areas. On the highest part of the city itself was a place called the acropolis, a fortified area that served as a place of refuge during attack and as a center of social, political, and religious life. The Greeks thought that life outside the polis did not allow human beings to flourish, or reach their full potential. Their word for people outside the polis, barbarian, came from their word for a baby’s sound (this is what they said other languages sounded like.)

The polis had to protect itself through the rise of a military. The mainstay of their army were the hoplites, heavily armed foot soldiers with spears and swords.

Each polis traded. As they became sea-faring their pace of change increased and their wealth increases. The wealthy aristocratic and merchant classes became very powerful. As resentment among the lower classes grew, Tyrants overthrew the power of the aristocrats by force and began to rule the city-states. Tyranny began.

The era of Tyrants, although short, was important in Greek history: it broke the power of aristocrats and opened up the opportunity for wide participation in Greek governments. In some city-states it led to democracy. In others, to an oligarchy.

B. Athens and Sparta

Athens evolved from a monarch to an oligarchy. By the 7^th century the oligarchy faced troubles. Serious economic problems faced Athens. After going through several leaders, one leader finally created a city counsel of 500 elected member who made the decisions and laws. This counsel was chosen by land-owning males and became the basis of Athenian democracy.

As Athens’ economy improved, it began to grow in trade. It began to put together a navy for protection.

Sparta emerged on the Peloponessus. Rather than colonize and trade over long distances, they simply attacked and enslaved the people around them. This behavior required them to create a strong military state for protection and stability.

The military was the center of Spartan life, and all males were required to serve in the army from age 20 to 60. The men lived and ate together in the barracks; their wives raised the children at home to be soldiers. At age 7 they were taken from the mothers and raised by the government. Children unfit for military service were not allowed to live. As a result, the Spartan men were tough and mean; they were known as the best soldiers in all of Greece.

Spartan society is known for it conformity and rigid discipline. The military and society were so interwoven as to be indistinguishable. Spartans were ont allowed to travel abroad and foreign visitors were not welcome. They believed they had nothing to learn from anyone else and did not want disruptive influences coming into their polis. Anything than might encourage new thoughts—philosophy, literature, and the arts—were forbidden. Spartan society was a disciplined war making machine.

C. The Persian War

To the east of Greece, the Persian empire began to grow. The Ionian coast was conqueror by the Persians. When they revolted against Persian, they were assisted by the Athenian navy. Persians, under Darius I, retaliated against Athens. They landed on the shore at Marathon and were defeated by the Greeks. (One man ran all the way to Athens to report the victory—hence the modern Marathon.)

Darius’ successor, Xerxes, vowed revenge and launched a major invasion of Greece. This time, the Spartans and Athenians put aside their arguments and joined forces to battle the Persians. The most famous battle was at Thermoplylae, where a small band of Spartan soldiers held the Persians briefly to save the Athenian navy. Although Athens fell and was burned, the Greek forces were saved and came back to defeat the Persians.

Classical Greece

A. The Age of Pericles

After the Persian war Spartan turned their troops to civilian life and Athens turned their fleet into merchant ships. The Spartans suffered terrible unemployment and food shortages, while Athens grew wealthy and entered its most flourishing time. Pericles, a general from the war, became the most important figure in Athens. Pericles did some important things:

1) he brought direct democracy to Athens. Every male citizen was allowed to vote on all issues of the government. The citizens also practiced ostracism: they wrote the name of anyone they considered dangerous to the state on a piece of pottery. If 6000 people chose the same person, that person was banned from the city for 10 years.

2) He ordered the building of the Parthenon. This brought harsh resistance because of the incredible cost.

Homer and the Ancient Greeks

What moves the heroes in Homer’s epics is not any atman or cosmic universal force, but rather something that arises within themselves. They are overcome by passions, something thought to be natural, corporeal, something emanating from their body and being; they have an earthy quality, even their gods. Homeric gods are heroes writ large, they are immediate, portentous; they desire what men desire and wield little control over destiny itself. Even Zeus understands that chance operates at every turn of history. There are no final answers to the great questions. The only difference between gods and men is mortality. The Iliad and Odyssey tell us that our place in the universe is earth with its wars, love, failed aspirations, and heroic gestures that promise no guarantee of success.

Iliad begins with anger. Achilles is enraged with prideful, passionate anger because he is not able to keep the booty of battle. So furious is he that he begs the gods to have his own people defeated in battle. Thus we have a prominent theme in Plato’s dialogues: that terrible things are going to happen when passion controls reason (hence the expression being “beside ourselves.”) The Iliad closes with Achilles’ murder of Hector, commander of the Trojan forces. Achilles ties the body of Hector to chariots and it is torn asunder as the horses race around the city of Troy. Hector is called the “breaker of horses.” One of the cardinal aspects of Hector’s identity will signal his undoing. “Heroes in Homer fail by not doing their duty as heroes—by their hubris or overwhelming pride, by not recognizing their mortality.

In Homer there is an internal war between the passions and reason. Under the perfect circumstances, there may be times that man can temporarily find solace and peace, but as far as there being any final solution to life, all bets are off.

Homer insists that the most tragic of all is the “hearthless, lawless, stateless man,” man living beyond the polis. The answers to life’s questions can be found only within a civil context. And this civil context would be the City States of Greece.

There is a long debate on why philosophy began in Greece. The ancient Greeks tended to see themselves estranged in the world. They were intimidated by life, by their surroundings. The rise of trade introduced them to many cultures much different than their own. They were struck by how bizarre and irrational the traditions of other people seemed to them; and they tried to make their estrangement from the world less punishing by understanding the world and asking questions about it.

The question “what is there” can be brought up in a moral sense. Is there in fact right or wrong, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsity? How do we know? Some have argued by an intuitive type of folk wisdom. But there is no agreement on these issues from tribe to tribe, nation to nation. How are these things determined in different places?

Protagoras answers this question by stating, “Man is the measure of all things.” By this he meant there was no non-human standard to apply to this. “Each person’s experiences and perceptions constitute reality for that person—a reality that can claim as much ontological validity as any other.” Are not sweet and sour sensations subjective? Just as taste is subjectively determined, cultural values dominate our metaphysical speculations. Protagoras thus relativizes epistemology. “What is there” is a relative question; the quest for truth will be open ended and the solution never definitive.

Protagoras wrote of the gods:

About the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they are not, nor how they are constituted in shape; for there is much which prevents such knowledge, the unclarity of the subject and the shortness of human life.”

Our knowledge is limited by our mortality, these are matters we cannot reach. What one person is prepared to die for is regarded by another as evidence of the ridiculousness of the human imagination. Not only are our answers to fundamental questions conditioned by our culture and experiences, but so are our methods for proving our case on such issues. This robust skepticism, which is a hallmark of the pre-Socratics, will be taken on directly by Socrates.