Week 4 Lecture Script PDF

1 Pogorzelski Classics 2200 Week 4 Lecture: A Brief History of Ancient Greece and Rome Hello, and welcome back to Classics 2200: Classical Mythology. This week I have an overview of Ancient Greek and Roman history for you, and I want to start this not by talking about history directly, not by telling you the story of the origin Ancient Greece and some of its development, but instead I want to start by talking a little bit about why I think a lecture about history is an important one for the course. History and Memory On Slide 2 is a quotation from Cicero. Cicero lived in the first century BCE in Rome. He was a politician, a lawyer, and a philosopher, and in a work called De Oratore (in book 2, chapter 36—and I’m quoting from the Loeb Classical Library translation by Sutton and Rackham), he wrote the following about history, “And as History, which bears witness to the passing of the ages, sheds light upon reality, gives life to recollection and guidance to human existence, and brings tidings of ancient days, whose voice, but the orator’s, can entrust her to immortality?” This translation, as most translations are, is fine, but it’s not really fully satisfying to me, and I also put the Latin on the slide so I can say a few words about the way Cicero phrases this. He calls history the testis temporum, which means “the witness of the ages,” and the lux veritatis, which means “the light of truth,” and the vita memoriae, which means the “life of memory,” and the magistra vitae, which means “the teacher of life,” and the nuntia vetustatis, which means “the messenger of antiquity.” That all seems lovely and elegant to me, and I think the English translation Sutton and Rackham give in the Loeb volume falls short of Ciceronian eloquence. It’s fine to read the translation, but the Latin is just better. 2 Pogorzelski One of the points I want to focus on here is related to the point I made last week about how learning about the past and telling stories about the past is a big part of how we determine and maintain power relations in the present. There’s a kind of hard-nosed and cynical reason to understand the importance of the past. Malinowski taught us that there are charter myths, and the study of history and the transmission of historical information is full of charter myths. We justify the way we do things now by appealing to the past and trying to take lessons from history. Cicero was a politician and a lawyer, and the quotation comes from a treatise he wrote about oratory— about giving speeches. And that’s a very practical kind of skill for Cicero. He wants to make policies and make laws and political decisions. He wants to get people to vote for him and for the policies he wants in place, and he wants juries and judges to decide in favor of his clients. So, giving persuasive speeches is what he does. In fact, rhetoric, or the art of persuasive speaking, was one of the most sought after and well-paid professions in Ancient Greece and Rome. Education for aristocratic men focused on rhetoric and oratory, and becoming a lawyer and politician was the most honorable career path. It was the major everybody wanted to get into, and it was a very useful and practical skill. I still think persuasive speaking is an important and useful skill in modern Canada, but it’s less crucial and less sought after than it was in Ancient Greece and Rome. But the point here is that within that field of persuasive speaking, Cicero highlights history as a key tool in persuading people to do what you think they should do. The speaker who can tell the best and most compelling stories about the historical past is the one who is going to persuade people. So, Cicero thinks that history is important for politicians, not just because they need to learn from it, but also because they need to use it in their speeches. 3 Pogorzelski I want to highlight in the quotation from De Oratore that Cicero calls history the vita memoriae, of the “life of memory.” One of the reasons I think history is important and worthwhile is its connection with memory. In the first place, I mean a kind of social or collective memory. We think sometimes of memory as an individual, private thing. I remember stuff from my own past. But societies and communities have a kind of collective memory too, and this is in the stories people tell about the past of the society or community. We often call this social memory. Social memory means that individuals don’t just remember what happened to them as individuals, but we also remember through stories what happened to people who lived long before us. We can read Cicero in a kind of romantic way, where when he talks about history as the magistra vitae, the teacher of life, we can see that social memory teaches us how to behave and how to find the best course of action. There’s something cynical in that too. Cicero is from the elite, wealthy class—the ruling class. And he can use the so-called teacher of life to teach people about why it’s important that people like Cicero stay in power. Just like individual memories shape us as people and make us who we are, social memory shapes a society and makes it what it is. So, one way in which history and memory are related is that history acts as a social memory that shapes a community and the power relations that organize that community. I also want to relate history not just to collective or social memory, but to individual memory too. On Slide 3, this week’s lecture is an overview of the history of Ancient Greece and Rome, but I want to preface that history with a little bit about why I think it’s important, and that has a lot to do with memory. I’m going to make an argument that this lecture about history is going to help you to remember what I’m trying to teach you in the course, and I’m also going to argue that the skill of memory is an important one for you to develop. I think memory is more 4 Pogorzelski important than a lot of people think it is now in the modern world, and it was even more important for people in Ancient Greece and Rome than it is for us now. In the ancient world, writing was rare and expensive, and there were not a lot of texts around. When people read, they often read the same texts over and over, and they often listened to recitations rather than reading. In a culture as oral as those of Ancient Greece and Rome, memory played a larger role than it does in our culture. We tend to think of reading as a very old technology, and it is. Reading and writing were new in the time of Hesiod, but even at that time, writing had been around for a long time, it’s just that it had disappeared from Greece for a few centuries before Hesiod. So, reading has been around for thousands of years. But the kind of reading we do today is very different from the kind of reading that was available in antiquity. Certainly, the digital revolution has made reading available to people in a way that it never was before, but I think the biggest change in reading started in the nineteenth century, in the 1800s, with the invention of the paperback book. The world literacy rate in the middle of the nineteenth century was somewhere around 10%. That is, only 10% of the people in the world in the nineteenth century could read. Now, well over 80% of the population of the world is literate, in fact, the world literacy rate is close to 90%, and it’s rising. That’s an amazing change in less than two hundred years, and it’s one of the biggest factors that has shaped the society we live in. A lot of that change in the literacy rate is because of the paperback book. Paperbacks are cheaper than hardcover books, and in the nineteenth century, paperbacks suddenly made lots of good reading material available to people who never could have afforded it before. I think that cheap, convenient, and ubiquitous reading material in a society where almost everyone can read makes reading an entirely different kind of experience 5 Pogorzelski from the kind of reading that happens when reading material is rare and expensive in a society where almost nobody can read. Reading is woven into the fabric of our everyday lives in a way that makes it really difficult for us to imagine what it was like when it wasn’t that way. For Ancient Greece and Rome, literacy rates are very hard to determine, but even at the highest points of Greek and Roman civilization and in the most urban and educated environments, the literacy rate probably didn’t get above 30%, and if you include the total population of Greece or Rome rather than just the urban population, 10% is a more likely number. And it wasn’t just the case that few people could read. Even for those people, reading was a difficult and laborious process. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an old manuscript, but they are so hard to read. The handwriting is bad and the materials they made the books and paper from were not great. Even when they were new and in pristine condition, reading a manuscript was not easy like reading a printed book is. And manuscripts have to be copied by hand, so they’re very labor intensive and very expensive to make. There were very few books in the world in Ancient Greece and Rome, so when people read, they read the same stuff over and over, because it’s all they had. So, in this kind of culture, orality is much more significant than it is for us, and that means that people memorized a lot of stuff. To share literature, it has to be read aloud to a crowd or memorized. By the way, this is the origin of the lecture class. When a book was rare, the professor could just read from the book to the class instead of having the class buy and read many copies of the book. It’s not the best way to teach or learn, and it was invented for a world that has totally different conditions than ours. But we still use it because of the power the past has over the present. And there are good things about lectures too, but the point is that if you were in a class and your teacher was just reading to you from the book, you’d need to be able to 6 Pogorzelski remember what your teacher was saying. Moreover, even when people did read, the kind of rereading of the same stuff over and over again lends itself to memorization. If you’ve seen the same movie a million times, you know the dialogue. If you’ve read the same poem a million times, you can’t help but remember it. When we want to know something, we can just look it up. We have libraries full of books and we have the internet in our pockets. That wasn’t the case in Ancient Greece and Rome. To know stuff, they really had to memorize it. When Cicero wrote about oratory, it was important for him to include memory. On Slide 4, I can’t resist a brief detour into some ancient work on memory techniques. Orators used to memorize their speeches, and they were trained to use a technique we now often call the “method of loci.” In a treatise on rhetoric that used to be attributed to Cicero but we now know was written by somebody else whose name we don’t know (the treatise is called the Rhetorica ad Herennium), there is a discussion of that method. There’s a link to it on the slide: https:// www.lib.uwo.ca/cgi-bin/ezpauthn.cgi?url=https://www.loebclassics.com/view/ marcus_tullius_cicero-rhetorica_ad_herennium/1954/pb_LCL403.207.xml. When Cicero and his contemporaries gave speeches, they had to memorize those speeches. They didn’t have teleprompters or notecards to help them out. So, for a politician and lawyer, memorization was a crucial skill to learn, and of course the Ancient Greeks and Romans developed highly effective techniques for memorization. The most famous of those was this method of loci, or method of places. These days, it’s sometimes more colloquially called the memory palace. The idea is that when you’re trying to memorize something, you should imagine walking through a space that you know very well, like your house or your neighborhood or something. And you can imagine yourself depositing pieces of information you want to memorize in specific places along the way. 7 Pogorzelski Then, when you’re giving the speech or trying to remember the information, you imagine yourself walking through the space, and as you get to each place, the information is there and just comes to your mind. It turns out to work really well. So, in this treatise, the Rhetorica ad Herrennium, there’s a good description of the technique, and if you’re interested you can follow that link to read it. Slide 5 has a link to a similar discussion, this time from the first century CE Roman rhetoric teacher Quintilian, who also emphasizes the importance of memory for public speakers and describes the same technique for memorizing speeches (https://www.lib.uwo.ca/ cgi-bin/ezpauthn.cgi?url=https://www.loebclassics.com/view/quintilian-orators_education/2002/ pb_LCL494.63.xml). On Slide 6, these days, we tend to dismiss memory as unnecessary, but it really isn’t. Memory is good for you, and a certain amount of it is really necessary to live a normal life. I think if you exercise your memory, you’ll have a better quality of life. I get a lot of pushback from my classes when I try to tell them that memory is still important. As I just said a couple of minutes ago, we have the internet in our pockets. Who needs to memorize information? The challenge of the modern world is not the skill of remembering information, but the skill of sorting through and organizing the vast amount of information that’s available to us. We have this external kind of memory. And this kind of thinking isn’t new. Socrates didn’t like writing and reading because, among other reasons, when people got used to being able to look stuff up in writing, they wouldn’t need to memorize stuff anymore and they would lose the skill of memory. There’s a whiff of moral panic about this. The world moves on and old skills fade away and new skills become important. So why do you have to memorize that mathematical formula, or why do you have to remember the date when some historical event happened? If you need it in the 8 Pogorzelski future, you can always just look it up. I really and honestly think that kind of thinking is misguided. Let me give you an extreme example of why memory is important. My grandparents had dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. When they lost their memories, they stopped being able to take care of themselves and they could no longer live a normal life. If you can’t remember stuff, you can’t function in the world. And it’s not a matter of convenience, like if you can’t remember your credit card number you have to look at it or ask your computer to fill it in. Without at least some capability in memory, you can’t live. There are diminishing returns the better your memory gets. If you have an amazing memory, that doesn’t mean your life is going to be amazing. But I do think that thinking about dementia shows us that your quality of life is affected by your ability in memory, and if you exercise your memory and develop it with good techniques, you will have a better quality of life. That’s not only because exercising your memory when you’re young and middle aged can help to delay or prevent memory problems as you age, but also because even now, you’d be amazed at how much better life is when you remember more stuff. One of my favorite books for learning about memory, the importance of memory, and some of the best techniques for improving your memory is Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein. It’s a really enjoyable book that tells a story about memory competitions and the journey of the U.S. memory champion. Along the way, it has a lot in it about what we know about how memory works and why it’s important, and what techniques people use to win memory competitions. It’s not required reading for this course, of course, but it’s a book I recommend pretty highly. It’s great for helping you to become a better student. The reason I’m bringing it up now is because I want to tell you why I think learning Ancient Greek and Roman 9 Pogorzelski history is important in a course about mythology. History provides you with a kind of framework in which you can deposit the information you learn about myth. Let me explain by way of a story from the book. One of the stories Joshua Foer tells in Moonwalking with Einstein is about a half inning of baseball. If you sit down with someone who doesn’t know anything about baseball— they’ve never played or seen a game and they don’t even know the rules—and you tell them everything that happens in a half inning, it’s just a list of information. Almost everyone who doesn’t know anything about baseball will not be able to recite back to you the list of events you just told them. But if you sit down with someone who does know about baseball—someone who has played a lot and watched a lot of baseball—and you give them the same list of events for a half inning, most of those people will be able to recite back to you those events with a high degree of accuracy. The same thing works for all kinds of other stuff, like chess. If you show a chess player a position from the middle of a game, they’ll be able to recreate it from memory. If you show someone who doesn’t know chess that same position, they won’t remember it. Or if you show a chess player a nonsense position—a random collection of chess pieces on a board that could never be the result of a game—they won’t remember that well either. We have all these frameworks in our minds that our minds use to organize, understand, and retrieve information. That shows us a link between memory and knowledge, and it also shows the importance of having a framework you can use to store and retrieve pieces of information. For us, history can be that framework. A knowledge of history will help you remember things about myth. If you understand Ancient Greek and Roman history, you’ll have a mental organization system for storing and retrieving information related to Ancient Greece and Rome, like knowledge about mythology. 10 Pogorzelski Relatedly, the link between knowledge and memory allows us to use memorization as a kind of proxy measure for deeper knowledge. Sometimes, when I teach courses like this one that have multiple-choice tests that require students to remember and recall information, I get pushback from students and administrators who think that kind of testing is no longer useful. Who cares if my students have memorized the date when Hesiod wrote the Theogony? But here’s the thing about that kind of test. If a student has the knowledge and understanding of a framework about Ancient Greek and Roman history and culture, they’ll be able to memorize and recall that kind of information. So, when I ask you on an exam whether the first baseman struck out or hit a single or a double or whatever, I’m not really testing to see if you remember that particular piece of information. The aim of that question is to find out if you know about baseball. Because if you know about baseball, you can remember that kind of information, but if you don’t know about baseball, you can’t. I like tests that ask you to memorize and recall information not just because the information is important, but because the test tells me if you have the deep structure of knowledge behind that individual piece of information. It’s a lot harder to outsource that kind of knowledge and look it up. You may not be in university to learn information, but you are here to acquire knowledge, and knowledge is not something you can just look up on your phone. It’s better to know something than it is to know where to look it up. To be able to think, you have to know things—in Foer’s example, you have to know about baseball. And knowledge and memory are inextricable from each other. If you don’t have either one, you can’t have the other. Another metaphor that Foer uses for understanding memory is that it’s like layers of paint. When you’re learning a new subject, it’s really hard at first to remember anything about it, 11 Pogorzelski but the more you already know, the easier it is to remember even more stuff. You go through a reading assignment or a lecture or a problem set once, and you kind of remember some stuff about it. It’s a thin layer of paint you can see through. But then you go through it again, and you remember a little more—you put down another layer of paint. And eventually you’ve built up enough of a base that the coverage is no problem. Don’t get discouraged if you have trouble remembering things. It’s not because some people have great memories and some people have terrible ones. Anyone can remember stuff with enough repetition and the right techniques. If you don’t have a lot of experience with classics, remembering the stuff from this lecture is going to be hard. For me, it’s easy because I’ve spent decades building up my knowledge of classics. With this, like with anything you do, the more time you spend with it, the easier it gets. With that, I hope you’re at least a little convinced of two things. First, I hope you’re convinced that memory is still a crucial skill for you to develop even now in the twenty-first century. It’s worth exercising and developing your memory as much as you can. Second, I hope you’re convinced that spending some time on Ancient Greek and Roman history this week will help you to learn the knowledge about mythology that this course aims to teach you. History will give you a framework of knowledge to help you understand how all the details and little pieces of information fit together into a big picture about classical mythology. Ancient Greek History And so, on Slide 7, I have a broad, overarching structure for us. It’s a list of periods of Greek and Roman history. Of course, historical change happens gradually and in a complicated way, so periodization like this is not very precise. It’s not like the world changes on one day and then stays the same for a couple of centuries and then changes again, but thinking about the 12 Pogorzelski broad characteristics of stretches of time helps us to fit historical events together. For Greek history, our periodization starts all the way back in the Neolithic Period, from about 6500 to about 3000 BCE. This is the Stone Age. It literally means the New Stone Period, and it’s characterized by people using stone tools for agriculture. Last week I talked a little about the Paleolithic Period, or the Old Stone Age, in which people used stone tools for hunting and gathering. Agriculture came to the area that is now Greece in about 6500 BCE, and this began the Neolithic Period. Next is the Bronze Age, from 3000 to 1100 BCE. Life in the Bronze Age in Greece was a little more sophisticated, and it’s characterized by the use of bronze tools rather than stone ones. We can start to be a little more precise in our periodization now, and we often divide the Bronze Age into three parts: the early Bronze Age from 3000 to 2000 BCE, the Middle Bronze Age from 2000 to 1600 BCE, and the Late Bronze Age from 1600 to 1100 BCE. I’ll fill in the characteristics of those periods in the next few slides. Then comes the Early Iron Age from 1100 to 900 BCE, and this used to be called the Dark Age because it followed the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, but we don’t use that term so much anymore. It was dark at least in part because we didn’t have a lot of archaeological evidence to tell us about the time, and so it was dark because it was hard to see. We actually have a lot of good evidence now, and so we don’t call it the dark age so much anymore. The Late Iron Age was from 900 to 750 BCE, and you can see that our periods get shorter and our years get a little more precise as we get closer to the periods for which we have a lot of archaeological and historical evidence. The pace of change accelerates as time goes on, and it seems to us to accelerate even more than it does in reality because the more evidence we have, the more detailed we can be. By the time we get to the Archaic Period, from 750 to 480 BCE, we have good written records as well as archaeological 13 Pogorzelski evidence, and we can pinpoint years like 480 BCE because we know about big events—in this case the end of the so-called Persian Wars that we can date with precision as turning points in history. The Classical Period in Greece was from 480 to 323 BCE, and that precise date of 323 is there because it’s when Alexander the Great died. Following the death of Alexander and the breakup of his empire, the Hellenistic Period lasted from 323 to 30 BCE, and that date of 30 BCE is when the Roman Empire annexed the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms, beginning the Roman Imperial Period in Greece. And that gives us a good signal to switch to periods of Roman history. The Romans pinpointed the foundation of Rome in 753 BCE. That date is mostly made up by Romans who lived centuries later, but even though we can’t be that precise, it’s probably not too far off the actual beginning of Rome, so we keep using it anyway. Rome was ruled by kings at first, so we call the period from 753 to 509 BCE the Regal Period. In 509 BCE an aristocratic coup overthrew the monarchy, and began the Republican Period, which lasted until 27 BCE. That was when the first Roman Emperor, Augustus, took power, beginning the Imperial Period, that would last until 284 CE. That was then the new Emperor Diocletian stabilized and reorganized the Roman Empire, beginning what we sometimes call Late Antiquity and sometimes call the Later Roman Empire, which we often say lasted until 476 CE, when the last of the Western Roman Emperors was deposed. So that’s just a very brief timeline to provide a very broad framework for us, and now we can start adding some detail to it. On Slide 8, you can see a picture of the Franchthi Cave. 14 Pogorzelski By Xalaros, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10633638 The Franchthi Cave in the Peloponnesus was first inhabited in about 38,000 BCE and it was used by humans throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic Periods. The first evidence of agriculture and the domestication of animals at the cave dates to about 6000 BCE, which is probably right around the time agriculture arrived all over Greece at once. The cave was abandoned in about 3000 BCE. We’re pretty sure the Greeks, or rather the people living in what is now Greece in about 6000 BCE, did not invent agriculture. We think agriculture was brought to Greece from the Middle East. And you can see that the cave was inhabited for about 30,000 years before they even started growing crops and domesticating animals. Life was not only very simple, but it was mostly unchanged for a long time. We think in much shorter timescales. Even a few hundred years ago, life was totally different than it is now. In the Paleolithic Period, life didn’t change 15 Pogorzelski much for tens of thousands of years. And then the Neolithic Period was 3000 years of people just growing crops and raising animals and going along as always. The beginning of new technologies is slow, but once it builds up, more technology drives change more and more rapidly all the time. Who knows what life will be like even fifty or a hundred years from now, but in the middle of the Neolithic Period, people could have pretty accurately predicted what life would be like in five hundred or a thousand years. I mentioned that the people who lived in the Franchthi Cave were not Greek. They lived in what is now Greece, but they were almost entirely unrelated to Greeks as we know them. We have no idea what kind of language they spoke, but we do have evidence of when an early version of the Greek language came to Greece, and it wasn’t until the Bronze Age, so the people living in the area in the Neolithic Period did not speak any form of Greek. They also didn’t have any mythology we might call Greek mythology. We only include them in Greek history, because the place is now Greece, and we tell histories of places. I think it’s fascinating that we project the current territory of the modern nation state of Greece into the distant past long before there was anything like Greece. Nationalism does that. Everyone has a nation, and the nation claims the people who lived in the territory even before the nation was invented. We somehow can’t think except in terms of nations, since all geography is national now, and so the history of Greece is the history of the place, including before it was Greece. Slide 9 starts the Bronze Age for us. The Franchthi Cave wasn’t abandoned until about 3000 BCE, but already in 3500 BCE, there was on the island of Crete the beginning of a civilization that would soon have things like writing and palaces. We call this Minoan civilization. Minoan civilization was remarkably advanced, but we know little about it. Its 16 Pogorzelski earliest beginnings were in about 3500 BCE, but it wasn’t until around 2000 BCE that it reached the level of complexity and urbanization that we associate with it. Even though people in Greece lived in caves in the Neolithic Period, there were also Neolithic buildings. People did construct homes and public buildings for their communities, but they were nothing like the buildings of Minoan civilization in the Early Bronze Age. The remains of the palaces are simply amazing. And they had a writing system too. The language of Crete during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages was not Greek, and their gods were not Greek either. On the slide you can see an image of the so-called Snake Goddess. The statue was excavated in a Minoan palace, but we have no idea if it was religious or mythological. It looks like it probably was, but it doesn’t correspond to any later Greek imagery we can identify. 1700-1400 BCE. Figure of snake goddess. Place: Archaeological Museum of Herakleion. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ LESSING_ART_1039490345 They wrote using a system we now call Linear A, but we haven’t deciphered it, and we have no idea what any of the writing means. There’s not really any hope of deciphering it, either. We just don’t have enough evidence to do it. But even though the language wasn’t Greek, and the religion wasn’t Greek, Minoan civilization did have some influence on Greek mythology. In Minoan art, we see a lot of bulls. In Greek mythology, Minos was a king on Crete, and his wife 17 Pogorzelski fell in love with a bull and gave birth to the Minotaur, a monster who was half man, half bull. So we can already see in Minoan art the association between Crete and bulls that would later appear in the story of the Minotaur. And that, incidentally, is why we call it “Minoan” civilization. We have no idea what they called themselves, but we associate them with the later Greek story of King Minos, so we call them Minoan. On Slide 10, around 2000 BCE, there is evidence of widespread destruction in mainland Greece followed by the emergence of a new culture. Archaeologists theorize an incursion of Indo-European peoples. Goulandris Master, European; Southern European; Greek, Greece. circa 2500 BC. Cycladic Figure. Sculpture, Figure. Place: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA, Museum purchase, William H. Noble Bequest Fund, 1981.42 I don’t think I’ve used the term “Indo-European” before, so I should say a little about what it means. Linguists are often able to group languages into families, and they can show a kind of family tree or linguistic genealogy that explains how different languages are related—that is, how they came to evolve from common ancestors. You often hear, for example, about Romance 18 Pogorzelski languages. These are languages that descend from the Ancient Roman language: Latin. So, it’s clear that Spanish and French, for example, are closely related to each other and they have a common ancestor. They’re different languages, but they are related. It turns out that Ancient Greek and Latin are also very closely related, just like Spanish and French are. And here’s where it gets surprising: Sanskrit, an ancient language of the area that’s now India, is also closely related to Latin and Greek. It’s totally clear linguistically that this language of Ancient India and the languages of Ancient Greece and Rome all evolved from a common ancestor. Scholars first started noticing this in the sixteenth century, and by the eighteenth century, they started developing an idea that the peoples of India and Europe, because their ancient languages were related, must all have some common ancestor. In the nineteenth century, scholars started calling the family of languages Indo-European, and they hypothesized a lost ancestor of the languages called Proto-Indo-European, often abbreviated as PIE. From this point, there were three separate but related civilizations in what we now call Greece. Minoan civilization centered on Crete, Cycladic civilization on the Cycladic islands, and an emerging Mycenean civilization on the mainland. So even though mainland Greece suffered widespread destruction around 2000 BCE, Crete and the Minoans were fine, and they kept going. There was also a different civilization on the smaller, Cycladic Islands, the Cyclades, that was getting going around this time, and on the slide, you can see a characteristic sculpture of Cycladic culture. The features of Cycladic art show us that it was a different culture from the other cultures in Greece at the time. And on the mainland, there emerged from the destruction a civilization we call Mycenean. Just like we don’t know what the Minoans called themselves, we 19 Pogorzelski also don’t know what the Myceneans called themselves, but we do know that one of their major cities was the city the later Greeks called Mycenae, and so we call them the Mycenaeans. On Slide 11, during the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1600 BCE), the dominant Minoan civilization on Crete greatly influenced the emerging Mycenaean civilization (named after Mycenae) of the mainland. It was during this time that Greek mythology as we know it developed. The image on this slide is a gold mask that was excavated at Mycenae, and it is often called the mask of Agamemnon. There’s nothing about it that identifies it as Agamemnon’s, but since later Greek mythology says that Agamemnon was a king of Mycenae, and since the really nice gold mask was found there, the archaeologists who excavated it named it the mask of Agamemnon. 16th century BCE. So-called Mask of Agamemnon. metalwork. Place: National Archaeological Museum (Greece). You might wonder how we know that Greek mythology developed in this time. And the answer to that begins on Slide 12, which says that in the 15th and 14th centuries BCE almost all Minoan centers were destroyed by fire. When the palace at Cnossus on Crete was rebuilt, the language changed from a language we don’t know written in Linear A to a kind of Mycenaean Greek 20 Pogorzelski written in Linear B. Art and architecture also changed dramatically in the 15th century BCE as Mycenaean culture absorbed and superseded Minoan culture. So, I’ve already talked about how the Minoans had a writing system, and that we call it Linear A, but we have no idea how to read it. Something bad happened in Minoan civilization in the fifteenth century BCE, and it seems like there was some kind of big war or series of wars that brought down the whole civilization, and when people rebuilt the cities and palaces, they weren’t so much Minoan anymore. Now they look Mycenaean. But one thing that survived was the writing system. At the former Minoan sites and at the Mycenaean sites, archaeologists have found from the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries a bunch of clay tablets with writing on them, and the writing looks very similar to Linear A, but the words are all different and it’s clear that it’s a different language. And in the 1950s, an architect and amateur classicist named Michael Ventris figured out that the writing in what we call Linear B was a form of Proto-Greek, an early form of the Greek language. There was so much excitement around this discovery, imagining all the amazing things we could read. It turns out that all the writing in Linear B on these clay tablets was administrative records—things like inventories and receipts. It still tells us a lot we wouldn’t otherwise know, but it’s not the most exciting stuff. But what is exciting about it is that it tells us that the Mycenaeans were the ones who brought the Greek language to the area that is now Greece. When Mycenaean civilization took over the Minoan sites, they also adapted the writing system the Minoans used to their own language, and they started writing in Greek for the first time. And, from those records, we know things like the names of cities, like Mycenae, and the names of people, like Agamemnon. And when I say that it was at this time that Greek mythology developed, it’s because these tablets, while they don’t tell us stories from Greek mythology, they do use names from Greek mythology. 21 Pogorzelski The image on the slide is the so-called Lion Gate in the city of Mycenae, the greatest fortress of Mycenaean civilization. Take a look at the people in the photo to get a sense of the scale of the blocks that built the walls of the fortress. Mycenaean, LH IIIB (13th c. BC), Photographed: 1958. Lion gate. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ ABRMAWR_MELLINKIG_10310733641 If you look closely, you can see that over the gate is a pair of lions flanking a column, and that’s why we call this the Lion Gate. In any case, Mycenean civilization was the beginning of Greek culture as we know it. On Slide 13, the domination of Mycenaean civilization in the Aegean lasted from about 1400 BCE to about 1100 BCE. It was during this time that the historical Trojan War happened. Frank Calvert (who excavated from 1863 to 1868), Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld (who excavated from 1870 to 1873 and from 1879 to 1890), and Carl Blegen (who excavated 22 Pogorzelski from 1932 to 1938) excavated at Hissarlik in what’s now Türkiye and proved that it was the site of Troy. Troy VIII-IX (ca. 750 BC-500 AD), Photographed: 1991. Troy VIII-IX. Sanctuary. https://library.artstor.org/asset/ ABRMAWR_MELLINKIG_10310733970 Greek mythology tells us stories of the Trojan War, a great war between all of the Greek cities on the one hand and the wealthy and fabulous city of Troy on the other. Archaeology tells us that there was in fact a wealthy and fabulous city of Troy on the northwest coast of what’s now Türkiye, and that there was in fact a war there, or really several, suggesting that there is a real historical basis for the legend. The city was destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries, and there’s some debate about which destruction of the city is to be associated with the legend of the Trojan War, but the point is that it seems to have happened. Even though our earliest literary records of the Trojan War date to the Early Archaic Period in the middle of the eighth century at 23 Pogorzelski the earliest, they’re in some way historically accurate. Now, the story changed a lot over time, and the poems we have about the Trojan War probably reflect the culture of the Iron Age much more than that of the Bronze Age, so we can’t use them as historical records, but it is really interesting that the legends of Greek mythology, or at least this one, have some historical basis, however distant. On Slide 14, around the time of the Trojan War, Mycenaean civilization collapsed for mysterious reasons. Starting in about 1200 BCE, the great cities were destroyed by fire one by one over the course of about two generations. Similar destruction occurred all over the eastern Mediterranean from the Hittite Empire in the east to Sicily in the west. Egyptian inscriptions describe a powerful invasion of “northern peoples,” or “sea peoples.” All maps in this presentation are by Ian Mladjov and can be found at: https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/imladjov/maps 24 Pogorzelski The Trojan War that is remembered in Homer’s Iliad was somehow a part of this wave of destruction. So, starting at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE, a bunch of wars ended Mycenaean civilization and ushered in what used to be called the Dark Age. It was dark, as I’ve mentioned, because it has been difficult to find archaeological evidence from the period. One of the biggest reasons for that is that many of the major Mycenaean sites were abandoned at this point rather than rebuilt. When Minoan civilization collapsed, Mycenaeans rebuilt on the same sites. And when Troy was destroyed, for centuries it was rebuilt on the same site. But this time, something happened that meant a lot of the sites were abandoned, and people built their new communities somewhere else. And for a long time, archaeologists didn’t know where most of those new sites were. But now we have a lot of Iron Age excavations going, and the Iron Age is not as dark to us as it once was. On Slide 15, between 1100 BCE and 900 BCE (the Early Iron Age) communities were small and simply organized, but around 900 BCE they started to get larger and more complex. It was during the Late Iron Age (900-750 BCE) that the legends surrounding the Trojan War took shape. Workshop of the Athens Amphore 894. c. 725 BCE. Neck Amphora (Amphore). ceramics; vase painting. Place: Musée du Louvre. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AWSS35953_35953_30932052 25 Pogorzelski After the collapse of Mycenaean civilization in the twelfth century BCE, writing disappeared from Greece and the culture changed dramatically, but the Greeks still remembered the glory days of the Mycenaeans, and they passed down stories through the generations orally rather than in writing. Eventually, an oral poetic tradition developed, and I’ll have a lot more to say about that later in the course when we read some Homer. For now, the basic idea is that the Homeric epics were composed orally by a series of bards during the time between 1100 BCE and 750 BCE, when there was no writing in Greece. Then, in around 750 BCE, when a new and different writing system arrived in Greece, the poems were written down. We have surviving now two epics that Ancient Greek people attributed to an author named Homer, namely the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad tells the story of the tenth year of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus’ journey home from the Trojan War. But even though the poems were written down in the eighth century BCE, and even though the Ancient Greeks said that Homer wrote them, we now know that they were orally composed over the course of generations by many different bards. That means a lot changed in the telling of the story, and the Homeric epics, even though they seem to be about the Mycenaean period, are not a good historical guide to that period. They seem to tell us a lot more about the Iron Age than they do about the Bronze Age. And in the meantime, as oral tradition was creating the great mythic cycles of the Greek mythology that we know, an Iron Age civilization grew and thrived, producing and trading things like the vase on the slide, which when we get to our overview of Greek and Roman art next semester I’ll talk about as an example of the geometric style of pottery. On Slide 16, the 8th century BCE was a time of great change in Greece. The traditional date of the first Olympic games was 776 BCE, and this is probably not far from the truth. The 26 Pogorzelski Homeric epics were written down during the 8th century. The formation of the polis (the plural is poleis), you can see the spelling on the slide, occurred around this time as well. Polis is the Ancient Greek word for what we often call a city-state. It’s an independent city with its own government that controls some territory around the city. In Greece it was often organized around a hilltop city-center called an acropolis. Unlike the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, the transition from the Iron Age to the Archaic Period in Greece was not marked by evidence of widespread war or destruction. Instead, what makes us mark a new period here is a flowering of civilization. New art styles and new poetry and new architecture all emerge around this time, and Greek cities start developing new laws and new forms of government too. This was the period in which some of the poleis made early forms of democracy, while others were ruled by oligarchies or tyrannies. This is when writing reemerges in Greece and we see the first written laws, and also the first written poems, like Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days along with the Homeric epics. 27 Pogorzelski You can see on the map on the slide that even though the city-states were politically independent, and, by the way, we get the word “politics” from the Ancient Greek word polis, they all spoke in one or another dialect of Ancient Greek. And they had a common culture too. The Olympic Games were a panhellenic festival, and they weren’t the only one. There were these big events where people from all the poleis would gather and use rituals to confirm their membership in a larger, Greek community. On Slide 17, the Greeks also sent out colonies around the Mediterranean and Black Seas during the 8th century BCE. The major cities of Greece, like Athens and Sparta and Corinth and Thebes were all thriving at this time, and increasing populations allowed them to sacrifice some of that population to found new cities. You can see a map on this slide of Greek colonies that were founded all around the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, and a huge wave of that 28 Pogorzelski colonization occurred at the beginning of the Archaic Period in the eighth century BCE. It was a time when rising populations meant competition for land was increasing, and poleis were sending groups of people to establish cities in places like Sicily and what’s now Ukraine. There were a lot of Greek colonies on Sicily and around the southern coasts of Italy in particular, and if you go to Sicily you will see that the ancient ruins there are very Greek. And there was a lot of Greek influence in Italy in a way that would influence Roman civilization too. And that brings up an important point about Greek colonization in the Archaic Period. It was an aggressive process, and it’s not like the places where they were founding new cities were uninhabited, empty space. So, there was conflict between Greek colonists and the people who already lived in those places. But at the same time, it’s not like there was some kind of unified Greek empire that was establishing a territorial empire around the Mediterranean and Black Seas. In other words, this isn’t much like the kind of European colonization that peaked in the 29 Pogorzelski nineteenth century. But it wasn’t without conflict and injustice, and we can see that reflected in the stories the Greeks tell about colonists and in the archaeological record as well. Speaking of violence, on Slide 18, the 7th century BCE saw the introduction of the hoplite phalanx, institutionalizing warfare between the Greek poleis. This was an era of intense competition between classes, as traditional aristocrats resisted tyrannies and the emerging middle class. A lot of the mythological stories we have about warfare are about individual heroes. In the middle of a battle, one guy will have a moment when he becomes unstoppable and defeats a bunch of enemies, or two heroes will emerge from the crowd to fight in single combat, but historically at this period, a style of warfare developed that made that kind of individual heroism counterproductive. A hoplite wore heavy armor and carried a big shield, and hoplites were most effective fighting in a close formation called a phalanx. Everyone would arrange themselves into a rectangle and the front rank would make their shields overlap, so everyone was protected. Then, if they were fighting against another phalanx, they would walk up to each other and the two front ranks of the opposing phalanxes would push on each other and try to knock the enemy down. Once people started falling over, the shields and formation weren’t very effective, and the people still standing could stab the people who were falling down with spears. And if, in this kind of fight, you had a big hero like Achilles trying to stand out in any way, that ruins the whole point of the phalanx. One of the consequences of that is that there is a kind of collective spirit and a sense of equality among the fighters. No one person can stand out from the crowd. Of course, not everyone could be a hoplite. In the ancient Mediterranean, soldiers had to buy their own armor and equipment, and the full, heavy armor a hoplite wore was expensive. So only 30 Pogorzelski relatively wealthy men could belong to this equal society of honorable warriors. There’s equality, but it’s limited to wealthy men. That same sense of limited equality was developing in politics in the Archaic Period as well. One way of organizing political communities is monarchy, and it seems like this was the case for a lot of Greek communities in the Bronze Age and Iron Age. But in the Archaic Period, the wealthy, elite men—the aristocrats—formed systems of cooperation between them. They started to share power, and they resisted when any one of them tried to stand out and become a king. In some cities, the system of aristocratic cooperation included only a small number of men, and the Greeks called this oligarchy, or rule by a few. In other cities, the ruling class was a bit larger and more inclusive, and the Greeks called this democracy, or rule by the people. It’s important to note, though, that even in democracies like Athens, participation in the democracy was limited to citizen men, and citizenship laws were restrictive. Moreover, even though Athenians didn’t need to be extremely wealthy to participate in the democracy, there was a small group of wealthy families that dominated the highest offices and owned a lot of the land. But both oligarchy and democracy were systems for sharing power. When one aristocrat took control of a city, often by bypassing cooperation with other aristocrats and appealing to the lower classes of the population to support them, the Greeks called this tyranny. They had another word for king, which was basileus, and the plural was basileis. The kings of places like Mycenae and Sparta and Ithaca in Homeric poetry are called basileis. They cooperated with each other, but within their own communities, they were kings. And Hesiod uses that word for king too. The Greeks called the king of the Persian Empire a basileus. They also had a kind of ceremonial, religious office that was part of the oligarchic and democratic systems that was still called 31 Pogorzelski basileus. But when one of the aristocrats took power in a city that was generally oligarchic or democratic, the Greeks called that man a tyrannos, or tyrant. In the seventh century BCE, the various poleis were inventing and adjusting these systems of government, and tyranny was common. Even Athens had a period of Archaic tyranny. And because tyrants relied on the power of the masses to support them against the opposition of the aristocracies, they often instituted policies that were good for the common people. Many of the dramatic festivals where Athenian tragedy and comedy flourished were either invented or expanded by the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus. Speaking of Athens, but moving on to the sixth century, Slide 19 says that in 594 BCE Solon the Athenian circumvented the competition between tyranny and oligarchy by reforming the Athenian government. He eliminated debt-slavery and made political representation based on wealth rather than birth. In 508, Kleisthenes further reformed the government of Athens in the direction of democracy. So, across the sixth century was the time when the Athenian democracy really took shape, starting with Solon and reaching its maturity with Kleisthenes. It was still before the great cultural achievements that we associate with Athens, like the tragedies and comedies and the philosophy and the architecture of the Acropolis, including temples like the Parthenon. Those were still to come, but political foundation of the democracy was laid down in the sixth century. And around Greece in general, we can see some of the roots of the cultural achievements as well. There is some excellent lyric poetry from this period, and the sixth century also saw the beginnings of Greek philosophy thanks to Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras. 32 Pogorzelski On Slide 20, you can see a map that shows the western edge of the Persian Empire and some of the Greek city states, and some stars marking places where there were battles between them in the early fifth century BCE. In 499 BCE the cities in Ionia, which was the west coast of Anatolia, in what’s now Türkiye, rebelled against Persian rule, and Athens sent aid to the rebels, who were nevertheless defeated in 494. Shortly afterwards the Persian king Darius I invaded Greece, but he was defeated not far from Athens at Marathon in 490. A subsequent invasion by Xerxes was turned back after battles at Thermopylae, Artemisium, and Salamis in 480 and finally at Plataea in 479. These battles between the Greeks and the Persians first under Darius and then under Xerxes are collectively known as the Persian Wars. 33 Pogorzelski The Persian Wars were a big moment in the formation and development of Greek identity. On the one hand, Greeks lived in independent poleis—in self-governing city states, and each city valued its independence highly. On the other hand, they shared a language and a culture, and the collective community that included many Greek city-states was reinforced by panhellenic rituals and festivals like the Olympic Games, which had been going on since the eighth century. In this system of independence and connection, Ionia was a special case. There were Greek poleis in Ionia, where the language and the culture were Greek, but they were all the way across the Aegean Sea from the main cities of Greece. And the Aegean Sea was a big deal to the Ancient Greeks. In the myth of the Trojan War, the Greeks form an alliance between independent city states to sail across the sea to fight against the Trojans, who lived in what the Greeks called Asia and spoke a different language. Actually, in the Trojan myths, the people of Troy spoke several different languages. In the stories, it’s all in Greek, but the characters and narrators tell us that the army fighting for Troy spoke a variety of languages. And this divide of the Aegean between Greece and Asia has carried a lot of cultural weight for a long time. If you look at a map of the world now and see the continents of Europe and Asia, it doesn’t really make sense that they’re separate continents. It’s all one big land mass. But they’re separate because the Aegean Sea separates Greece from Asia in the Trojan myth, and somehow that has carried down even into modern maps. So, the cities in Ionia were culturally and linguistically Greek, but they were across the Aegean in Asia, and so they were geographically and politically in the Persian Empire. And when the so-called Ionian Revolt started, it was those cities demanding to be both independent and also demanding a kind of affiliation with panhellenic identity. And when Athens sent aid to the rebels, it was the beginning of a real Greek military alliance against the Persian 34 Pogorzelski Empire just like the mythical one of the Trojan War. Of course it started a conflict that would draw in all the Greek city states and include two major invasions, the First Persian War against Darius and the Second Persian War against Xerxes. On Slide 21, the fifth century, following the victory over the Persians, was the height of classical Greek civilization. This was the time of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides as well as Aristophanes, Socrates, Pericles, Herodotus, and Thucydides. The sculptor Phidias created such statues as the Athena Parthenos and the Zeus of Olympia as well as the frieze and the pediments of the Parthenon in this century. This is the Classical Period in Greece, and when we think of Ancient Greece, most often we’re thinking about something from this period. It was an amazing time for Greek culture. The literature, art and architecture were some of the best that has ever been made. But, on Slide 22, the fifth century was also a time of brutal warfare as a democratic coalition led by Athens and an oligarchic coalition led by Sparta fought the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). It was a time of slavery on a massive scale as well. On this slide, you can see a map of the Peloponnesian War: 35 Pogorzelski This was a war between two alliances of Greek city states. It wasn’t exactly a civil war, because the poleis were independent, but it did involve civil conflict within cities. Often within a polis, a democratic faction would fight against an oligarchic faction not just over how to govern the city, but now also over which side of the war to fight on. And there’s something interesting about the relationship between freedom and war in Ancient Greece. In ancient empires, peace was an imposition. The Roman Empire talked about imposing peace on others and making them stop fighting. Sometimes the Persian Empire tried to impose peace on Greece. But the Greek city states were fiercely independent and they valued their freedom highly. And a big part of that freedom was the freedom to fight wars. Wars were terrible, and the Greeks lamented them, but peace was not just a thing to hope for, it was also an imposition to fear. The Peloponnesian War was an expression of the freedom to fight and the refusal to accept peace if it was on someone 36 Pogorzelski else’s terms. The war lasted for 27 years—a whole generation. Plus, it wasn’t just the Peloponnesian War that was bad in this period. It’s easy to look at Ancient Greece and see the positives—the literature and the art and the philosophy and the democracy. It’s just as important to see that those cultural achievements were built on a foundation of massive injustice. The lives of the poorest people were brutal, the patriarchal culture was intensely oppressive, controlling women’s sexuality as I’ve already talked about, but especially in Athens, respectable women stayed indoors and stayed silent. Pericles said that the chief virtue of Athenian women was their silence. And the Ancient Greeks enslaved many people, and the amazing achievements of the time depended on the labor of enslaved people. I think it’s important to think both about the great achievements of Ancient Greece, and also about the injustice that surrounded those achievements. Sometimes when I take a moment to emphasize injustice in Ancient Greece, people tell me that I shouldn’t be so negative, because slavery and patriarchy were normal at the time, and we shouldn’t judge Ancient Greek people by the moral standards of our time rather than the standards of their own time. In some ways, I think that’s right. We shouldn’t feel too self- righteous about judging ancient people. If I were an Athenian aristocrat living in the fifth century, I’d totally have participated in all the bad stuff, just because that was the environment and the culture. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that there’s something in us that would mean we’d be the one lone voice to stand up for what’s right. Sometimes we do see some injustice other people don’t, and we can take a stand and start something. Those are important moments. But most of the time, most people do what their society says is right. At the same time, I think we can judge the Ancient Greeks for their injustice as well. We’ll see in some of the myths that we read this 37 Pogorzelski year that the Ancient Greeks were well aware, for example, that they treated women unfairly and unjustly. This is going to be especially apparent when we read about Medea, who was both a woman and an immigrant, and she gives some powerful speeches about how she has been mistreated on both grounds. And the Ancient Greeks also knew that nobody wanted to be enslaved, and that that was a bad thing to do to another person. It’s not like they couldn’t see that what they were doing was wrong—they just couldn’t see another way, or the people in power didn’t want to see another way. And so, when I think about Ancient Greece, I try to keep both perspectives in mind. There were oppressors and oppressed people, and the kinds of oppression prevalent in Ancient Greece were bad. It’s not a good idea to just ignore that. On the other hand, that prevalence of oppression shouldn’t make us decide to ignore the achievements of Ancient Greece, without which we wouldn’t have many of the things we value highly today. And we can use that kind of thinking on both sides to think about our own cultures too. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking we don’t live with systems of oppression, but let’s also not ignore the achievements and the good things about our cultures even as we try to correct injustice. On Slide 23, the fourth century BCE was the time of Plato the philosopher, Aristotle the philosopher, and Demosthenes the orator. Although I think we’re right to praise the fifth century as the time of Athens’ greatest achievements, the fourth century was no slouch, and if you’re thinking of philosophy or rhetoric, the fourth century was the height of Athenian culture. When Ancient Greek people wrote about “the poet,” they meant Homer, and when they wrote about “the orator,” they meant Demosthenes. And of course, who was more important in the history of Greek philosophy than Plato and Aristotle? But the fourth century was also the time when the Greek city states lost their independence, and they were conquered by the Macedonians and 38 Pogorzelski made into a unified empire. Philip II of Macedon fought a successful campaign to unify all of Greece, against fierce opposition, including especially from Demosthenes. When Philip was murdered in 336, the twenty-year-old Alexander became king. He took the army his father had used to unify Greece under Macedonian rule, and he invaded Persia with it. Eventually he conquered territory all the way to the Indus River. You can see on the slide a map of the empire. But when Alexander died in 323 BCE, his empire fragmented as various generals fought over who would succeed him. They ended up setting up separate kingdoms and ruling as monarchs over parts of the empire and fighting against each other for a greater share for generations. Alexander’s brief empire and the more durable kingdoms of his successors were not just a political entity, but a cultural one as well. The administrative language of the empire was Greek, and the widespread use of it made out of the different dialects of Greek a new dialect the Greeks called “common.” The Greek word is koine. And the aristocrats and the ruling classes of the successor kingdoms spoke Greek, and to greater and lesser extents they adopted Greek culture. They were not Greek, in the sense that they didn’t live in the traditional territory of 39 Pogorzelski Greece, but they were culturally and linguistically Greek. Since the Greek word for Greece is “Hellas,” and the Greek word for Greek is “Hellenic,” and these people were only sort of Hellenic. We call them Hellenistic. On Slide 24, the death of Alexander marks the end of the Classical Period and the beginning of the Hellenistic Period. The third century BCE was a time of sophisticated learning. The Stoic and Epicurean schools of philosophy flourished, and the Library of Alexandria was founded. There was intense scholarly interest and activity at this time. Euhemerus and Apollonius of Rhodes, for example, wrote during third century BCE. If the fifth century and the Classical Period in Ancient Greece were dominated by Athens, and to a lesser extent by Sparta, the Hellenistic Period was much more diffuse. There were still wonderful achievements, but they were spread over a much larger geographical area, and they resulted from a greater variety of cultural interactions. So, for example, the Library of Alexandria was a Hellenistic achievement, and it was great, but it wasn’t in Greece. Alexandria was in Egypt, which was ruled by the successors of Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals. It was a Hellenistic kingdom. And Alexandria was one of the major centers of Greek culture. The library allowed scholarship to flourish there like nowhere else, and some of the very best Greek poetry is Hellenistic poetry from Alexandria, and from the other Greek cultural cities that were not in what we think of as Greece. You can see on the slide a map showing the major Hellenistic cities: 40 Pogorzelski Ancient Roman History On Slide 25, the third century BCE was in the Hellenistic Period in Greece, but it was also the time when Rome first started getting involved in Greek politics and Greek wars, so this is a good time to transition from Greek history to Roman history. It wasn’t until the second century BCE that Rome effectively conquered Greece, and when the Achaean Confederacy rebelled against Rome in 146 BCE, Rome defeated the rebellion and destroyed Corinth. After 146, Rome was the virtually unchallenged ruler of the Mediterranean. But already in the third century, Rome was getting involved in Greece. On the slide you can see a map of the kingdoms of the Mediterranean in the middle of the third century BCE: 41 Pogorzelski Slide 26 takes us back to the beginning of Roman history, and we’ll work our way back to the third and second centuries soon. The traditional date for the foundation of Rome was 753 BCE, and there was a town on the site of Rome at that time. Early Rome was ruled by elected kings, but at the end of the sixth century BCE an aristocracy overthrew the monarchy and instituted the Republican government. You may remember that in the middle of the eighth century in Greece, there was a lot going on. Populations were increasing, writing came back, the panhellenic festivals were getting started, and new types of laws and political organizations were emerging. It wasn’t just in Greece that exciting things were happening. In Italy, cities were getting larger, and populations were rising too. The later Romans thought that their city was founded at that time, and it makes good sense that it would have been. It was also a time when Greek cities were establishing new colony cities in southern Italy and Sicily. Naples, for 42 Pogorzelski example, was a Greek colony. Rome was not one of these Greek colonies, but the kind of ideas they brought to the region couldn’t help but have an impact. On Slide 27, from an early date, the influence of Greek colonization in the south of Italy meant that the Romans connected their traditional Italian gods to the Greek gods. So the Romans worshipped a god they called Jupiter, and he was similar to the Greek Zeus, and so they get identified with each other. And then as time goes by they evolve to become the same god, just with two different names. And that means that from the very beginning, from the Early Archaic Period in Greece and the Regal Period in Rome, Greece and Rome were two separate cultures, but also closely related to each other. Greece and Rome grew separately together for a while, but the Classical Period in Greece was much earlier than the equivalent in Rome. The cultural influence and power of Athens in the fifth century was not even close to being paralleled in Rome, although it is worth pointing out that the Romans overthrew the monarchy and instituted the Republican government in the late sixth century, which was right around the time of Kleisthenes’ reforms in Athens, establishing the classical Athenian democracy. So, the kind of political revolutions and experiments with oligarchy and democracy at that time weren’t limited just to Greek cities. Still, the art and architecture and literature of Athens in the fifth century had no contemporary parallel in Rome. But in the third century, after the death of Alexander the Great, when Greek kingdoms were still fighting with each other over the division of the empire into Hellenistic kingdoms, that conflict spread into southern Italy. On Slide 28, in 280 BCE the Greek colony of Tarentum in southern Italy enlisted the aid of Pyrrhus of Epirus to resist Roman conquest. Rome defeated Pyrrhus in 275 and captured Tarentum in 272, completing the conquest of Italy. A coin issued by Pyrrhus is 43 Pogorzelski our first example of the legend of the Trojan origin of Rome. Here, again, you can see a map of the Mediterranean kingdoms of the time: So, at the beginning of the third century BCE, Rome was an independent city-state in central Italy, and it had been over the last few centuries gradually becoming the leading military power in the Italian peninsula. The Romans fought a series of wars with their Italian neighbours, and over the long term, they were the victors. They didn’t exactly have a territorial empire controlling the Italian peninsula, though. Instead, they had a whole bunch of separate treaties with the other independent Italian city states. In 280 BCE, they were fighting a war on some pretext against the independent city state of Tarentum, and the people of Tarentum appealed to one of Alexander’s successor kings, Pyrrhus of Epirus, to help them. Epirus is just across the Adriatic from Italy, and Pyrrhus was a Macedonian king who claimed to be a descendant of 44 Pogorzelski Achilles. He brought an army over to Italy, and initially he won a great victory against the Romans, but he lost so many soldiers in the fighting that when the Romans counterattacked, Pyrrhus lost. That’s why we call a costly victory a Pyrrhic victory. The victory over Tarentum and Pyrrhus was an important moment for Rome for a few reasons. Firstly, it gave them effective control of the entire Italian peninsula. Secondly, it was the first time that Roman armies had had a serious fight against Greek armies, and the Romans won. And thirdly, it was an important stage in the integration of Rome into Hellenistic civilization. One way that Rome started to get incorporated into the Hellenistic world was through mythology. The Romans had a myth of the origin of Rome that it was founded by Romulus, who killed his brother Remus, after the two of them had been raised by a wolf. But at some point we can’t identify, another origin myth for Rome developed, and that was that the Romans were the descendants of the refugees who fled Troy after the Trojan War. A Trojan prince named Aeneas gathered the survivors and led them away to find a new place to live. And the myth goes that they went to Italy and settled there, and eventually their descendants would include Romulus, Remus, and the Romans. And the first time we have any evidence of this myth of the Trojan origin of Rome is from Pyrrhus. We have coins that Pyrrhus issued saying that he, as a descendant of Achilles, would recreate Achilles’ Greek victory over the Trojans by defeating their descendants, the Romans. I think that’s interesting because it shows that just as the Romans were becoming a military and political force that the Hellenistic Greeks had to pay attention to, there was an effort, and we have no idea whether the Romans or the Greeks started it, but they both ran with it, to find a place in the ancient, mythological past for the Romans. It was a way to 45 Pogorzelski integrate the Romans into the mythological stories that the Greeks told about the ancient history of the world. Rome could, in this way, join the Hellenistic world in a way that made sense. It wasn’t just in the myth of the Trojan origin of Rome that Rome began to enter into Hellenistic civilization after the war against Pyrrhus. Rome, like all the Mediterranean city states of the time, had a practice of enslaving people when they were victorious in war. When you win, you enslave the people you defeated in the war. And one of the people from Tarentum that the Roman general enslaved was a Greek rhetoric and literature teacher named Livius Andronicus. That, by the way, was not his original name, but the name he was given when he was enslaved. On Slide 29, Livius Andronicus was brought to Rome from Tarentum as a slave after the war with Pyrrhus. In 240 BCE at a festival in honor of Jupiter, he staged a tragedy on a Greek subject —the first regular dramatic text in Latin. He then translated the Odyssey into Latin. Forty years after he was brought to Rome, this Greek teacher introduced to Rome a Greek theatrical production. And it wasn’t unusual for cities all around the Mediterranean and in Hellenistic kingdoms to stage Athenian plays. What was really unusual about this was that the play Livius put on was that he staged it not in Greek, but in Latin. So, the Romans didn’t just adopt Hellenistic culture wholesale, they brought Hellenistic culture to Rome, but they adapted it to their own language and their own traditions and rituals. And Livius Andronicus also introduced Latin epic by translating Homer’s Odyssey into Latin. Sometimes people talk about how it was a big deal in the European Renaissance when authors started writing not just in Latin, but in their vernacular languages, like Dante writing in Italian. The Romans did that first. Instead of using the literary language of Greece, they used the forms of Greek literature like tragedy as inspiration for literature in their own vernacular, Latin. 46 Pogorzelski There was, in the third century BCE, a third major power in the Mediterranean. In addition to Greece and Rome, there was also Carthage, a powerful city state located in what’s now Tunisia. The three major powers all had a presence in Sicily, and the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage was a naval war over control of Sicily. The wars are called Punic because the original foundation of Carthage was as a Phoenician colony, and Phoenician became Punic. On Slide 30, the third century BCE was also the time of the First and Second Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. In 218 BCE Hannibal crossed the Alps and ravaged Italy. Rome decisively defeated Carthage in 201 BCE, but it was not until the Third Punic War (149-146 BCE) that Carthage was destroyed. You can see on this slide a map showing the territory the Romans controlled at the end of the third century during the Second Punic War: 47 Pogorzelski There’s an interesting mythological angle in the Second Punic War as well. Heracles or Hercules was a mythological hero who was closely associated with geographical exploration of the world, and of the west in particular. The so-called Pillars of Hercules were the strait at Gibraltar between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Hercules didn’t just explore the areas—the myths also say that he fought monsters and wild beasts all around the world to make the wild regions safe for humanity. And many Roman generals and Roman emperors liked to associate themselves with Hercules. You can see some statues of Roman emperors wearing a lion skin, like Hercules did and carrying a club like Hercules did. But it seems that Hannibal also claimed the legacy of Hercules, and in Roman literature, the figure that most frequently gets connected with Hercules is Hannibal. He was the greatest enemy Rome faced, and the war against Hannibal was the closest Rome came to destruction, and that combination of greatness and threat is kind of perfect for Hercules. We’ll see in a couple of weeks when we read Seneca’s Roman tragedy about Hercules that he is both a great hero and a great threat. And the association of Hannibal with Hercules helps to integrate the Punic Wars into a mythological system that can help the Romans make sense of the war and the place of Rome and Carthage in the world. In any case, Rome’s decisive victory in the Second Punic War established them as the preeminent military power in the Mediterranean, and really they were recruiting their armies not just from Rome but from all around Italy. By the middle of the second century BCE, when they fought the Third Punic War and destroyed Carthage, they were also effectively the rulers of Greece as well. When we say Rome destroyed Carthage, we mean that they burned it down, killed a bunch of people, and enslaved a bunch more. The Romans did the same thing to the Greek city of Corinth in the same year as they destroyed Carthage: 146 BCE. The Romans didn’t 48 Pogorzelski yet claim that they were ruling Greece directly, but any time a Greek city did something they didn’t like, the Romans had the military power to punish that, as they demonstrated very effectively in Corinth. On Slide 31, you can see a map of the territory Rome controlled after the destruction of Carthage and Corinth: By this time, Rome, that little city state in central Italy, was the dominant power in the Mediterranean, controlling the territory from what’s now Portugal to what’s now western Türkiye, including the North African territory that used to be Carthaginian. But, as the slide says, there was great turmoil in the city. In 133 BCE a radical senator named Tiberius Gracchus was clubbed to death by his colleagues. The later Romans saw that assassination of one senator by others as a symbolic point marking a descent into political chaos and civil war. Externally, Rome 49 Pogorzelski was in total control, but the mechanisms of a city state that were developed in the sixth century BCE with the establishment of the Republic were not equipped to deal with the kind of territory Rome now found itself ruling, and that meant a lot of problems in the city. Let me try to explain what some of the problems were, and I’ll start by talking a little bit about the organization of the army. In the early days of Rome, like in the early part of the Republican period, the Roman army was entirely a volunteer army in which soldiers bought their own equipment and nobody got paid. The Romans would hold an assembly, called the Centuriate Assembly, in which everyone gathered and was organized into so-called centuries by wealth. The wealthiest Romans were organized into a group called the Equestrians or the Knights, because they could afford to own horses, and so they were the cavalry in the army. And then there were slightly poorer classes that would serve in various infantry roles, and then the poorest people were called the proletarii or the proletariat, and they were ineligible for military service because they couldn’t afford it. So, when the Romans needed an army, a consul would call an assembly and recruit an army according to the wealth of the men. And they would fight for a campaign season. The summer was suitable for fighting battles, but in winter, everyone would go home and wait for the next year, when the new consul would recruit a new army. And this pattern of volunteer armies buying their own equipment and serving for a single campaign season was the basic pattern for all ancient Mediterranean city states. It was, for example, how the Greeks fought. One of the reasons Sparta won the Peloponnesian War was the brilliant innovation late in the war that instead of disbanding the army and taking a break for the winter, the Spartans left a permanent military force camped outside of Athens even in the winter. That was crazy, but it worked. Anyway, so the Romans had this kind of military setup, but when they started fighting 50 Pogorzelski wars farther from the city of Rome and when they needed to keep control of territory outside of Italy, they couldn’t send the armies home for the winter. Instead, they asked generals to serve for many campaign seasons in a row and keep the armies with them. And that meant that the soldiers were not home in time to harvest crops in the fall or plant in the spring, and they lost their farms and the money that made them eligible for military service to begin with. So, these soldiers became more dependent on their generals, and the generals were obligated to start paying the soldiers and promising them rewards like new farms when the campaign was over. So, the big armies were now personally dependent on their generals, and the generals had armies that were personally loyal to them and not so much to Rome. Meanwhile, in Rome, the small farms were being bought up by wealthy landowners when they failed because the soldiers were away for years at a time, and they were being converted to large, cash crop plantations worked by slaves, which meant that nobody was growing staple foods, and grain had to be imported from the provinces. That put pressure on governments to organize difficult logistics to feed the people, many of whom were unemployed because their farms had been bought by the men running the government and their jobs were replaced by slave labor. So, the point is that the mechanisms that had been set up and made sense for a city state were not adequate to the task of running an empire, and that meant that just at the time the empire was getting dominant in the Mediterranean, the city started getting into real trouble. On Slide 32, at the end of the second century BCE and the beginning of the first, Rome faced great difficulties, including a difficult war in Numidia, a slave revolt in Sicily, a series of losses against the Cimbri and the Teutones, and finally a rebellion of the Italian cities. The two generals who succeeded in overcoming these challenges, Marius and Sulla, fought a civil war 51 Pogorzelski that only ended when Sulla became dictator in 81 BCE. This was the first in a series of civil wars between Roman generals who had armies that they paid for and that were personally loyal to them. Marius was best known for reforming the army into a professional one. He allowed the proletariat to serve, he provided equipment, and he paid his soldiers. Really the transition was a more gradual one and not a sudden invention by Marius, but it was around this time that the professional fighting force that was loyal to a single general became the norm in Rome. On Slide 33, the precedent of the civil war continued, and the next generation was the last of the Roman Republic. The first century BCE was the time of Cicero, Pompey, Caesar, and Cato as well as Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian. You can see on the slide a map of Roman territory at the time: 52 Pogorzelski Ancient Greece had a Classical Period when the art, architecture, literature, and rhetoric was flourishing, and the Late Republican Period is the start of something similar for Rome. The temples and the poetry and especially the speeches from this time are wonderful, and we have a relatively large amount of written evidence about the politics and culture of the time. But just like the Classical Period in Greece was a time of intense warfare between Greeks, the Late Republican Period in Rome was also a time of intense warfare between Romans. Sometimes these times of chaotic upheaval are the times when art flourishes the most. On Slide 34, the last major battle of the Roman civil wars was the battle of Actium in 31 BCE. Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra, and when he settled affairs in Rome in 27 BCE he took the name Augustus and became the first Roman Emperor. You can see on the slide a map of the Roman empire at the time: 53 Pogorzelski This marks the end of the Republican Period and the beginning of the Imperial Period in Rome. Rome had had an empire with a lowercase “e” for a long time, but now it had an emperor too. It didn’t just have an empire, now it was one. It was the Roman Empire with a capital “E.,” and the new governing system Augustus introduced (more on that in a minute) was much more suited to running the empire than the old system had been. The reason we mark a new historical period here is not just because Augustus became the emperor and ended the Republican government, though. When Augustus, who wasn’t yet named Augustus but was still Octavian, was fighting in a civil war against the Roman general Marcus Antonius, or Marc Antony, Antony allied himself with Cleopatra the Seventh, who was the Ptolemaic ruler of the Hellenistic kingdom of Egypt. And when Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium, he annexed Egypt for Rome, and that ended the independence of the last Hellenistic kingdom. So, it wasn’t just the end of the Republican Period in Rome—it was also the end of the Hellenistic Period in Greece. Now Greek history and Roman history became unified in the Roman Imperial Period. At the time, Augustus didn’t declare it the end of the Republican Period at all. He claimed to be restoring the Republic after generations of civil war. He made sure all the proper elections took place and all the proper officials served, but he also indicated which candidate he wanted to win every election, and those candidates won. He was the general in charge of the last remaining army, so what he wanted happened, even though he wasn’t officially in charge. He liked to make a distinction between power and authority. He said he gave up all his power after Actium, but he maintained authority, and it was his authority that meant that people did what he wanted. And on Slide 35, the age of Augustus was a golden age of Latin literature, and some of our best sources for Roman mythology are from this period. Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are from 54 Pogorzelski this time. In general, the art and architecture and culture of Rome reached a high point in this period. Augustus boasted that he had found Rome a city of bricks and he had made it a city of marble. He ordered all the old temples rebuilt in grand style, and he set up public parks and art galleries and libraries. He acted as a patron for the best poets of the time and encouraged them to devote themselves to poetry, especially on mythological topics. This was when Rome really became a cultural power as well as a military one. On Slide 36, the first two centuries CE were a relatively stable time in Mediterranean history. There were some tyrannical emperors, like Caligula and Nero, and there were also some civil wars over the imperial succession, but in general it was a peaceful time. In 212 CE the emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire. On this slide, there’s another map of the Roman Empire, this time at its greatest territorial extent: 55 Pogorzelski Edward Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, thought that if a person had to choose a time and place to be alive in the premodern world, this period of the Roman Empire was the best time and place to be alive. I’m not sure how right he was about that, because there have been other good times, but the quality of life and the peace and stability of the Roman empire in the first couple of centuries CE was very good for a premodern society. That kind of stability never lasts forever, and on Slide 37, the third century CE was a time of increasing instability and frequent civil war, which was ended only by the powerful emperors Diocletian (285-305) and Constantine (312-337). The gradual Christianization of the Roman Empire after Constantine’s conversion changed but did not end Rome. Historians talk about the crisis of the third century in Rome, and things really were not great for a while, but the Roman Empire went on and it made it through the crisis. We mark a new period here, sometimes called the Later Roman Empire, and sometimes called simply Late Antiquity. And finally, on Slide 38, although the Eastern Roman Empire would continue until the Arab expansion in the 7th century CE, the Western Roman Empire fragmented and was effectively nonexistent after

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