Ancient Greece

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Ancient Greece
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• Though the origin of the Hellenes, or ancient
  Greeks, is unknown, their language clearly
  belongs to the Indo-European family. Named after
  the mythical king Minos, the Minoan civilization
  flourished on the island of Crete in the second
  millennium B.C.

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• In the same period, the Myceneans developed a
  wealthy and powerful civilization on mainland
  Greece. At some point in the last century of the
  millennium, the great palaces were destroyed by
  fire. With them, the arts, skills, and language
  of the Myceneans vanished for the next few
  centuries, a period called the "Dark Age" of
  Greece. Much of what we know about them is based
  on the body of oral poetry that became the raw
  material for Homer's epic poems, the Iliad and
  Odyssey.

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• By serving as a basis for education, the Iliad
  and Odyssey played a role in the development of
  Greek civilization that is equivalent to the role
  that the Torah had played in Palestine. The
  irreconcilable difference between the Greeks gods
  of Olympus and the Hebrew god led to a struggle
  from which only one survived.

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• For those raised under monotheistic religions or
  cultures, the Greek gods and their relation to
  humanity may seem alien. Whereas the Hebrews
  blamed humanity for bringing disorder to God's
  harmoniously ordered universe, the Greeks
  conceived their gods as an expression of the
  disorder of the world and its uncontrollable
  forces. To the Greeks, morality is a human
  invention and though Zeus is the most powerful
  of their gods, even he can be resisted by his
  fellow Olympians and must bow to the mysterious
  power of fate.

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• For those raised under monotheistic religions or
  cultures, the Greek gods and their relation to
  humanity may seem alien. Whereas the Hebrews
  blamed humanity for bringing disorder to God's
  harmoniously ordered universe, the Greeks
  conceived their gods as an expression of the
  disorder of the world and its uncontrollable
  forces. To the Greeks, morality is a human
  invention and though Zeus is the most powerful
  of their gods, even he can be resisted by his
  fellow Olympians and must bow to the mysterious
  power of fate.

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• Though united by their common Hellenic heritage,
  Greek city-states differed in customs, political
  constitutions, and dialects.

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Pallas Athena
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• They were often rivals and fierce competitors,
  establishing colonies in the eighth and seventh
  centuries along the Mediterranean coast. The
  Greeks who established colonies in Asia adapted
  their language to the Phoenician writing system,
  adding signs for vowels to change it from a
  consonantal to an alphabetic system. First used
  for commercial documents, writing was later
  applied to treaties, political decrees, and,
  later, literature.

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• Inspired by their defeat of the Persian invaders,
  Athens and Sparta emerged as the two most
  prominent city-states of the fifth century B.C.
  With the elimination of their common enemy,
  however, the two cities became enemies,
  culminating in the Peloponnesian war, which left
  Athens defeated.

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• Before its defeat to Sparta, Athens developed
  democratic institutions to maintain the delicate
  balance between the freedom of the individual and
  the demands of the state. By the time of
  Sophocles, Athens had become an empire,
  establishing a league of subject cities, which it
  taxed and coerced.

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Greece and its colonies, 550 B. C.
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• Professional teachers, called Sophists, educated
  affluent male citizens of Athens in the
  techniques of public speaking and in subjects
  such as government, ethics, literary criticism,
  and astronomy. The secular and humanist spirit of
  Athenian culture is best expressed in the words
  of the Sophist Protagoras "Man is the measure of
  all things."

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• Unlike the Sophists, Socrates proposed a method
  of teaching that was dialectic rather than
  didactic his means of approaching "truth"
  through questions and answers revolutionized
  Greek philosophy. Socrates exposed illogicality
  in old beliefs but did not provide new beliefs.
  His ethics rested on an intellectual basis. Due
  to his insistence that it is the duty of each
  individual to think through to the "truth,"
  resentment against Socrates built, culminating in
  a death for impiety.

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• In the next century, Athens became a center for
  schools of philosophy based on his ideas,
  especially as espoused by Plato and Aristotle.
  Founder of the Academy in 385 B.C., Plato's
  literary and philosophical contributions often
  explored ethical and political problems of his
  time featuring his teacher Socrates as speaker.
  The first systematic work of Western literary
  criticism, the Poetics, was written by Aristotle,
  a member of Plato's Academy.

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• Except for his name, we know nothing about the
  poet Homer, and there is no trace of his identity
  in the poem. The basis for Homer's Iliad and
  Odyssey was an immense poetic reserve created by
  generations of singers who lived before him.
  Homer made use of an intricate system of metrical
  formulas, a repertoire of standard scenes, and a
  known outline of the story. Unlike most oral
  literature, the poetic organization of the two
  works suggests they owe their present form to the
  hand of one poet.

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• Focused around the events that transpired in a
  few weeks of the ten-year Trojan War, the Iliad
  tells the story of the Achaeans and Trojans in
  war. Both gendersthe men who do battle and the
  women who depend on themare affected in this
  tale of war. Starkly unsentimental, Homer's tale
  suggests that human beings must implicitly deal
  with both destructive and creative impulses.

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• The Odyssey deals with the peace that ensued and
  places emphases on the lives of the surviving
  heroes of the war. It tells the story of Odysseus
  on a quest to return to his homeland, Ithaca, and
  be reunited with his son and wife. Along the way,
  he has many adventures and must rely on his
  intellect, wit, and strength to extricate himself
  from perilous situations.

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• Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey offers easy
  answers questions about the nature of aggression
  and violence are left unanswered, and questions
  about human suffering and the waste generated by
  war are left unresolved.

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• Though Sappho's lyric poems give us vivid
  evocation of the joys and sorrows of love, it is
  the drama that emerged more than a century later
  that is most closely associated with classical
  Greek literature.

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• Greek comedy and tragedy developed out of choral
  performances in celebration of Dionysus, the god
  of wine and mystic ecstasy. Thespis was probably
  the first to add a masked actor, who engages in
  dialogue with the chorus, to these performance
  later Aeschylus added a second actor, creating
  the possibility for conflict and establishing the
  prototype for drama as we know it.

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• The seven plays of Aeschylus are the earliest
  documents in the history of Western theater.
  While Aeschylus's plays reflect Athens's heroic
  period, those by his younger contemporary
  Sophocles, especially Oedipus the King, reflect a
  culture that was reevaluating critically its
  accepted standards and traditions. Even more so,
  Euripides's Medea is an ironic expression of
  Athenian disillusion. The work of the only
  surviving comic poet of the fifth century,
  Aristophanes, combines poetry, obscenity, farce,
  and wit to satirize institutions and
  personalities of his time. Though parodic in
  tone, the work often carries serious undertones,
  thus adding to the rich diversity of writings
  from the ancient Greek world.

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The Epic (structure)

• Epics include the following elements 1) a tragic
  hero with one fatal flaw (i.e. Odysseus's anger)
  and heroic or supernatural abilities (the gods
  intervene exclusively on his behalf) 2) a series
  of adventures and quests and 3) a foil or series
  of characters who offer a contrast to the epic
  hero (i.e. Kyklops is Odysseus's polar opposite).

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• The traditional epic follows a cycle of
  introducing the hero setting trials for the hero
  to endure introducing supernatural challenges
  after mortal challenges are achieved and
  restoring the hero to heroic status.

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Key Concepts

• Fate plays an important role in Greek culture,
  stemming from the idea that the gods influence
  the course of men's lives for better or worse.
• Hubris is an act of pride that leads to
  punishment by gods or leaders. It is the
  equivalent of "sin" in Judeo-Christian culture
  and occurs when man's pride leads to his own
  destruction
• Hero gt qualities?
• Hospitality
• Contest
• Suffering and grief gt source?

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Odysseuss voyages