Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History PDF

Introduction Like their legendary hero, the Greeks were irresistibly drawn to distant shores. From early in their history and continually throughout antiquity they ventured over the seas to foreign lands seeking their fortunes as traders, colonizers, and mercenary soldiers. Their limited natural res...

Introduction Like their legendary hero, the Greeks were irresistibly drawn to distant shores. From early in their history and continually throughout antiquity they ventured over the seas to foreign lands seeking their fortunes as traders, colonizers, and mercenary soldiers. Their limited natural resources forced the Greeks to look outward, and they were fortunate in being within easy reach of the Mediterranean shores of Asia, Africa, and Europe. By the fifth century BC, they had planted colonies from Spain to the west coast of Asia and from North Africa to the Black Sea A BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF GREEK HISTORY Greek culture was forged in the crucible of the Bronze Age civilizations that cropped up in worlds as diverse as unified Egypt and fragmented Mesopotamia. Absorbing key skills from these highly developed neighbors-metallurgy, for ex- ample, and writing- the Greeks built a distinctive culture marked by astonishing creativity, versatility, and resilience. In the end, this world dissolved, as Greek civilization, having reached from France and Italy in the west to Pakistan in the east, merged with a variety of other cultures-Macedonian, Syrian, Iranian, Egyptian, Roman, and finally Byzantine. Greek became the common language throughout the Near East and was the language in which the texts collected in what we call the New Testament were written. Through its incorporation into the Roman Empire and the fusion of Greek and Italian elements in mythology and architecture, a hybrid culture known as "Classical" came to hold an important place in the traditions of Europe and the Americas. Greek government and society often seemed to function in an entirely secular manner. Marriage, for example, was a purely civil affair, and divorce was not believed to distress the gods at all. The gods were nowhere and everywhere. Ideals of equality were preached by men who usually owned slaves and believed in the inferiority of women. Stolid, warlike Sparta and cultivated, intellectual Athens considered them- selves polar opposites. The funeral oration for the war dead Thucydides put in the mouth of the Athenian statesman Pericles encapsulated many of the differences seen from the Athenian point of view. Yet people in both cities lived by agriculture, worshiped Zeus and the other Olympian gods, subjected women to men, believed firmly in slavery (provided they were not slaves themselves!), sacrificed animals, considered war a constant in human life, preached an ethic of equity among male citizens, cherished athletics and delighted in the Olympics and other competitions, enjoyed praising the rule of law, considered Greeks superior to non- Greeks, and accepted as axiomatic the primacy of the state over the individual. The history of the ancient Greeks is one of the most improbable success stories in all of world history. A small people inhabiting a poor country on the periphery of the civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, the Greeks created one of the world's most remarkable cultures. In almost every area of the arts and sciences they made fundamental contributions, and their legacy is still alive in western and Islamic civilizations. Throughout the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, Sparta was cherished as the model of a mixed and therefore stable constitution. Both Sparta and Rome with constitutions based on checks and balances were the models for American government. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more attention was focused on Athens, where it is possible to witness the gradual erosion of privilege based on wealth and lineage and the growth of democratic machinery- law codes and courts, procedures for selecting officials and holding them accountable, and public debates and votes on matters of domestic and foreign policy. The devastating Greek world war of 431-404 known as the Peloponnesian War (because of Sparta's location on the peninsula of the Peloponnesus) placed a damper on the extraordinary burst of creativity that had marked the fifth century- the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the comedies of Aristophanes; the building of the Parthenon at Athens and the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Throughout this painful era and the decades that followed, thinkers continued to explore the questions that had intrigued Greek intellectuals at least as far back as the sixth century- the origins of the universe and the mechanisms by which it functioned; the relation between physis (nature) and nomos (custom, or Jaw); how and what mortals can know about the gods; what these gods might want from people; whether indeed true knowledge was possible for humans; what the best rules might be by which people could live together in society; what the best form of education was-who was most qualified to direct it, and how many could profit from it; under what circumstances the rule of a single wise man might after all be best. New questions were also posed- whether involvement in politics ought really to be the focus of a man's life; whether the individual might find identity separate from the state; whether war was worth the sacrifices it entailed; and even whether slavery and the disfranchisement of women were necessary (though those radical speculations did not result in social change). Even though the Greeks left us a comparatively rich record, we possess only a tiny fraction of what was originally there. Yet there is good news, too. Every year new discoveries are made that continue to enlarge our fund of information, while, at the same time, new ways of looking at the old sources have broadened our perspectives.