A. Place. "Ancient
Greece" was not really a "country" or "nation," as
we ordinarily think of these terms (and certainly
not a centralized kingdom, as you might guess from
the depiction of the heroic age in the
Iliad). Rather, it was a cultural
constellation of competing city-states that had a
single language and civilization in common. During
all the historical periods that we are studying ,
"ancient Greece" included not only the city-states
in the geographical area that we know as "modern
Greece" or "Hellas," the most prominent of which
were Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Argos, and Thebes,
but also other equally important city states all
over the Mediterranean Sea. Here are some
examples... In the East and North-East: Miletus,
Smyrna (= Turkish Izmir), Chios, Mytilene,
Byzantium (= Turkish Istanbul); in the South:
Cyrene (in African Lybia); in the West: Syracuse
(Sicily), Tarentum (Italy), Naples (Italy),
Massalia (= French Marseille). The ancient Greeks
would agree that they shared the same language,
despite the staggering variety of local dialects.
They would even agree that they shared a
civilization, though they would be intensely
contentious about what exactly their shared
civilization would be. Each city-state had its own
institutions, that is, its own government,
constitution, laws, calendars, religious practices,
and so on. Both the sharing and the contentiousness
lie at the root of the very essence of the
city-state. What I am translating here as
"city-state" is the Greek word polis. This
is the word from which our words political and
politics are derived.
B. A most basic
observation about ancient Greek society: 'The
human being is an organism of the
polis'.--Aristotle, Politics I 1253a2-3.
(Often mistranslated as 'Man is a political
animal'.) Here we see the basis for the concept of
civilization. In other words, human beings achieve
their ultimate potential within a society that is
the polis. From this point of view, the ultimate
humanism is achieved politically.
C. The most basic
aspects of their civilization that most ancient
Greeks could agree about:
1. interpolitical
festivals; primary examples: the Olympic
festival (= "Olympics") at Olympia, the Pythian
festival at Delphi, the Panathenaic festival at
Athens
2. interpolitical
repositories of shared knowledge; primary
example: Delphi
3. interpolitical
poetry; primary examples: the
Iliad and
Odyssey of Homer, the
Theogony and Works and Days of
Hesiod.
D. I use "interpolitical"
instead of "international" because I do not want to
imply that each polis is a nation. In my own
writings, I use a cover-term for "interpolitical":
Panhellenic. Panhellenism is the least common
denominator of ancient Greek
civilization.
E. The impulse of
Panhellenism is already at work in Homeric and
Hesiodic poetry. In the Iliad, the names
"Achaeans" and "Danaans" and "Argives" are used
synonymously in the sense of Panhellenes = "all
Hellenes" = "all Greeks."
F. Homer represents an
interpolitical or Panhellenic perspective on the
Greeks. Homeric poetry is not tied down to any one
polis. It presents the least common denominator in
the cultural education of the elite of all
city-states. How can a narrative or "story" like
the Iliad be an instrument of education? We
will get to that later.
G. In the Classical
period, Herodotus is on record as saying that Homer
and Hesiod are the foundation for all civilization.
Note that Herodotus defines civilization in terms
of religion (the forms and functions of
gods).
H. Finally, an essential
point about ancient Greek religion: not only were
the gods worshipped, Heroes too were worshipped.
The worship of heroes was very much like ancestor
worship. (Compare similar customs in other
traditional societies, including the Japanese.)
Besides the word worship, we may use the word cult.
As in hero cult. (Other relevant concepts:
cultivate and culture. More on these concepts in
lectures.) That is one of the main topics of my
book Best of the Achaeans. Another useful
word: ritual. I will have more to say on the
concepts of worship, cult, and ritual in Lecture
I. (It is enough for now to give two main
examples of ritual: sacrifice and war. Moral
problems of killing animals to eat their meat,
killing other humans. A classic discussion is
Walter Burkert's Homo necans.)
|