The Western Tradition:

Covering the ancient world through the age of technology, this illustrated lecture series by Eugene Weber presents a tapestry of political and social events woven with many strands — religion, industry, agriculture, demography, government, economics, and art. A visual feast of over 2,700 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art portrays key events that shaped the development of Western thought, culture, and tradition.  Below is a list of media presentations by Dr. Weber; each one is approximately thirty-minutes (30) in length.  These are being offered to the student as a supplement to other sources presented in this section.  The student needs to provide “log-on” information to get access to the presentations; there is no cost to the student. Review Units:

 

The Rise of Greek Civilization
Democracy and philosophy arose from Greek cities at the edge of the civilized world.

Greek Thought
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle laid the foundation of Western intellectual thought.

Alexander the Great
Alexander's conquests quadrupled the size of the world known to the Greeks.

The Hellenistic Age
Hellenistic kingdoms extended Greek culture throughout the Mediterranean.

One of the great paradoxes of history is that the next hesitant advance of European civilization - the development of the first city-states - took place not on the fertile open central European plains, but in a remote island to the south of the Aegean Sea which was completely lacking in metal resources.  While the glittering mounted warrior-princes of central Europe dissipated their creative energy in warfare, a highly cultured yet peaceful society, built on trade and an agricultural surplus, emerged on Crete.

The history of Greece can be traced back to Stone Age hunters.  Later came early farmers and the civilizations of the Minoan and Mycenaean kings. This was followed by a period of wars and invasions, known as the Dark Ages. In about 1100 B.C.E., a people called the Dorians invaded from the north and spread down the west coast. In the period from 500-336 B.C.E. Greece was divided into small city-states, each of which consisted of a city and its surrounding countryside.

 

Professor Page’s Study Questions: ·       What impact did the geographic landscape have in the development of Greek Civilization?

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Geography:

 

 

Greece was a poor country, barren and dry, in ancient times as today.  Unlike the rich river valleys of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the rugged Balkan Peninsula, the southeastern most extension of Europe, does not seem to be a likely setting for the ancient civilization it produced.  Its rivers are too small to be navigable, and they dry up in the blazing heat of the mostly rainless summers.  The Greek landscape is dominated by high mountains, which occupy about three-quarters of the land.[1]

 

  Perhaps the greatest Greek natural resource was the sea.  The Aegean Sea, between the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor, played a central role in the life of the ancient Greeks.  Because of the islands scattered across the Aegean, a seafarer is almost never out of sight of land, and the Greeks learned to travel long distances in small open boats.   Crete, the southernmost Aegean island, had an especially important role in the early history of Greece.

 

The paucity of cultivable land and natural resources led the Greeks to trade with other nations.  A mastery of the sea allowed them to transport goods to and from foreign lands.  The geography of the Balkan Peninsula influenced both the history and the myths of the Greeks.  The extremely mountainous terrain discouraged communication by land and favored political independence; through most of ancient Greek history, the various cities remained autonomous political entities. [2]

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Professor Page’s Study Questions:   ·       What is the meaning of “myth” and what role does it play in the lives of the ancient Greeks?

 

 

Early Bronze Age (2900-2000 B.C.E.)

 

Historians do not regard the inhabitants of the mainland during the Early Bronze Age as Greeks because their cultural traditions were very different from those of the people who eventually became known by that name.  We know nothing of their race or the language they spoke.  They seem to have been modest farmers who worshiped goddesses of fertility to increase the yield of their crops, a religion still vital among later Greeks and reflected in some Greek myths.  

The people later called the Greeks belonged to a cultural and linguistic group known as the Indo-Europeans, whose original homeland apparently was in central Asia, perhaps east of the Caspian Sea.  According to elusive evidence, Indo-European society may have been divided into three groups whose membership was determined by birth: kings and priests, warriors, and food producers.  They had a highly developed family life, and they were devoted to war.  Some think that some basic patterns in Greek myth go back to the Indo-Europeans. [3]

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Mycenaean Age (1600-1100 B.C.E.)

 

 

 

  There exists little archaeological evidence from the Early and Middle Bronze Age in Greece, but spectacular ruins and written documents survive from the Late Bronze of Mycenaean Age, named for the enormous stone citadel of Mycenae in the Peloponnesus.  This site was taken over by Greek-speaking Indo-Europeans about 1650 B.C.E.; immensely wealthy tombs from about 1600 B.C.E prove its richness and importance and provide a convenient date for the beginning of the Mycenaean Age.

 

The coincidence between centers of power in Mycenaean times and important locations in cycles of Greek legend—the Mycenae of Agamemnon, the Tiryns of Heracles, and the Thebes of Oedipus—indicate that many Greek legends probably originated during the Mycenaean period.  By 1150 B.C.E. fire had destroyed most of the Mycenaean palaces on the mainland.  Linear B writing disappeared forever.  Greece sank into a Dark Age that lasted nearly four hundred years.[4]

 

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The Dark Ages (1100-750 B.C.E.)

 

 

 

Later Greeks attributed the destruction of the Mycenaean world to an invasion by Greek-speaking peoples from the northwest Greece, whom they called the Dorians, equated with Sons of Heracles in Greek legend, about which important stories were told.  Although modern scholars cannot confirm the Dorian invasion, it seems plausible explanation of the archaeological evidence.

 

Very few archaeological remains survive from the Dark Age, a time of profound social disorganization, depopulation, and impoverishment.  Petty kings with only local authority replaced the great monarchs of the Mycenaean Age.  To judge from later traditions, Greek society was organized around family and village.[5] 

 

 Many settlements were split by tribal and family feuds and, in the Dorian areas, by a great gulf between masters and subjects.  What civilization remained seems to have centered on the long island of Euboea, just east of the mainland, where recent excavation have revealed rich burials, one a spectacular grave from c. 1000 B.C.E. containing a warrior and his wife, with many rare and valuable objects, some of gold. 

 

We are now learning that Euboean settlements were the only Greek towns to carry on direct trade with the Near East throughout the Dark Age.  Theses relations were to play a central role in the subsequent revival of Greek culture: The alphabet first appears on Euboea, where the poems of Homer and Hesiod may have been written down.[6]

 

 

Professor Page’s Study Questions: ·    What were the social, political, economic, and cultural transformations that emerged during the Greek Archaic Age (750-500 B.C.E.)

 

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Archaic Period (750 - 500 B.C.E.)

 

 

 

About 800 B.C.E., someone familiar with Phoenician writing, probably an Euboean, invented the Greek alphabet by requiring that a rough indication of the vowel accompany each consonantal sign.  The Greek alphabet was the first writing that encoded an approximation of the actual sound of the human voice, hence potentially writing applicable to any human language.  It is one of the most important inventions in the history of culture, the basis for all Western civilization and, except for minor changes, the same system of writing that appears on this page.

 

The Archaic Period witnessed the emergence of the Greek polis, the politically independent city-state.  Unlike the villagers of earlier eras, who defined their position by family relations, the members of a polis owed their allegiance to a social group defined by geography.  In the polis appeared for the first time the explicit concept of citizenship (“city-membership”), so important to the modern state.  Only men were citizens and could participate in political affairs; women lived in a separate world.  Within the polis, the Greek citizen was in relentless competition with his neighbor.  Greek cultural values depended on the spirit of male competition (unlike in Egypt, for example, where cooperation was the highest social value), and these values permeate the stories they told.

 

Another important development during the Archaic Period was the rebirth of commerce, which ebbed throughout the Dark Age.  The Greeks’ dependence on the sea for commerce, transportation, and food was essential to the formation of their character and had a direct influence on their social structure.

 

  Greece was never socially stratified in the elaborate fashion of the heavily populated and extravagantly wealthy river monarchies that grew up along the Nile and in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and the Greeks’ dependence on the sea further reduced class distinctions.  The sea is an equalizer:  The sudden dangerous storms of the Aegean threatened captain and crew alike, so claims to good birth and upbringing had no survival value.  Seafaring encouraged extreme individualism and offered rich rewards to the skilled adventurer willing to take the risks.  Seafaring was practiced almost entirely by free citizens, and in the Odyssey the Greeks invented the world’s first tale of danger and wonder on the high sea. [7]

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In the sixth century B.C.E, commerce received an enormous stimulus from the introduction of coinage, universally accepted weights of portable, indestructible metal certified by civic authority.  Before this time, money as we think of it did not exist.  Coined money made possible capitalism and the enrichment of new social classes by commerce.

 

  The traditional aristocracy looked down on and bitterly opposed these upstarts, skillful only at accumulating wealth, and called them kakoi, the “bad men,” while calling themselves aristoi, the “best men” (hence our “aristocracy”).  Despite the scorn of the aristoi, economic and political power fell more and more into the hands of the kakoi.

 

In cultural matters, however, the aristocracy clung to power.  As most literate citizens, its members were creators or sponsors of most Greek literature, art, and philosophy.  They gave to tyrant the pejorative meaning it still has today.  When speaking of Greek culture, we refer, with few exceptions, to the literary monuments produced by and for the aristoi, the free male citizens descended from old families.  About the kakoi, the poor, slaves, women, and other noncitizens, which were mostly illiterate, we have little direct information. [8]

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The Persian Empire:

During the latter part of the Archaic Period, a powerful rival from the East threatened Greece.  The Persians, an Indo-European people living on the Iranian plateau east of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), had developed into a dynamic warrior state under the leadership of Cyrus the Great (600-529 B.C.E.).  Conquering and absorbing first the Semitic states of Mesopotamia, then Egypt, and finally advancing into Anatolia (modern Turkey) and southern Russia, Persia became the greatest empire the world had seen.  Soon Persia absorbed the Greek colonies on the eastern coast of Asia Minor.

 

Professor Page’s Study Questions: ·       Why is this period in Greek history called: “The Classical Age” or the “Golden Age?”  What is meant by the entitlement “Crucible of Civilization?” ·       What factors served as a catalyst for the collapse of the Classical Period?

 

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Classical Period (500-336 B.C.E.)

 

 

Cleisthenes: “The Greeks Crucible of Civilization”

 

In 508 B.C.E., in Athens, a remarkable development took place: the emergence of the world’s first democracy (“rule by the people”; demos=”people”), an outgrowth of the centuries long disputes between the kakoi an aristoi.  Under the leadership of Cleisthenes, the social and political basis of the polis was completely reorganized to as to place decision-making power in the hands of all adult male citizens, who may have numbered about 25,000.  Citizens lived both in the countryside and in the city.  Henceforth, authority in government came not from the wealth and prominence of family, but from one’s ability to persuade the large, unruly assembly of citizens.

 

From this unique political climate emerged many of the forms of civilization familiar to us today:  written law, the rules of reason, the need for evidence, history, popular entertainment, science, and philosophy.  In Athens, ancient myths were recast as a new form of entertainment and instruction in the annual presentations of Athenian tragedy.  Democracy made the ordinary citizen feel he had responsibility for his own destiny.[9]

 

  The Persian army discovered, to their sorrow, the explosive power of this new form of government when they invaded mainland Greece in 490 B.C.E., a convenient watershed between the Archaic Age and the Classical Period.  In a tremendous battle near the village of Marathon, about twenty-five miles from Athens, Athenian citizen-soldiers smashed the professional Persian army and drove the invaders into the sea.  “This proved,” wrote the historian Herodotus, “if there were need of proof, how noble a thing is freedom” (Histories 5.78)

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  An even greater Persian campaign launched ten years later, in 480 B.C.E., also met with disaster, first in a naval battle off the island of Salamis near Athens and then on land near Plataea in Boeotia.  This second stunning victory over the Persians, under the Athenian leadership (audio) at sea and Spartan on land, fired the Greeks, and especially Athenians, with an unprecedented self-confidence and eagerness to try out new forms of thought, social organization, and artistic expression.  These amazing victories inspired the first study of history (Herodotus coined the word, which means “inquiry” in his great book) and mark the beginning of the brief Classical Period.

 

 

 

During this Classical Period, the Golden Age of Greece, lived many of the most influential thinkers, artists, and politicians: historians Herodotus and Thucydides; tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; comic dramatist Aristophanes; statesman Pericles (audio); philosophers Socrates (audio), Plato, and Aristotle; Ictinus, architect of the Parthenon; sculptor Phidias; and orator Demosthenes, to name only the most prominent.  All of these men were residents of Athens, a testimony to the city’s cultural supremacy fostered by its radical democracy.  From other cities during the Classical Period came the poet Pindar; Democritus, who fashioned the atomic theory of matter; and Hippocrates, “the father of medicine.”

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  During the Classical Period the polis reached its greatest effectiveness but also showed its worst faults.  Some of the tragedies of this era illuminate the violent tensions many citizens no doubt felt between ancient loyalty to the family and current loyalty to the political state.  Still, the polis triumphed as the ideal of social life.  In the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle described the polis as the perfect and natural fruit of a long social evolution.  According to him, “man is by nature a political animal,” that is, a being who reaches full potential only by living in a polis.

 

  Although the proud and politically independent city-states struggled constantly and murderously against one another, the Greeks nonetheless maintained the sense of being a single people.  They spoke a common language, used a common technology of writing, and called themselves Hellenes, implying a common descent from the legendary Hellen.  They worshiped the same pantheon of gods and participated in pan Hellenic religious and athletic festivals, especially at Olympia.  In the crisis of the Persian wars they combined briefly against the barbarian invader.  Once the Persian threat receded, however, they settled into two loosely organized rival leagues, one led by Sparta, a military state rule by an old-fashioned aristocracy, the other by democratic Athens.  From 431 to 404 B.C.E., these leagues fought each other in a ruinous conflict know as the Peloponnesian War.  Greece never recovered.[10]

 

  The Classical Period saw the development of Greek philosophy and history as powerful intellectual rivals to traditional myth.   Such physicians as Hippocrates and such philosophers as Protagoras and later Plato and Aristotle challenged mythic accounts of the origin and nature of the universe, and the historian Thucydides rejected the conviction, heretofore universal, that gods determine the outcome of human events.  The stories of gods and heroes were the common birthright of all Greece and were celebrated in painting, sculpture, song, and drama, but they were given new meanings in the intellectual ferment of this extraordinary age.

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Professor Page’s Study Questions:   ·       What is the meaning of the term “Hellenism?” ·       What are the primary legacies of Alexander the Great?

 

Hellenistic Period (323-30 B.C.E.)

 

 

The social and political system based on the polis was crippled in 338 B.C.E. when Philip II of Macedonia, a region to the north of Greece, over-ran the Greek city-states and imposed his will on them.  The Macedonian state was a monarchy and altogether unlike the Greek polis; although Philip admired Greek intellectual culture and Greek economic enterprise, he had no patience with the endless squabbles conducted in the name of “freedom.”

 

   When he was killed in 336 B.C.E. in a palace intrigue, his twenty-year-old son Alexander inherited the throne.  Moved by the legends of the Trojan War and seeing himself as a latter-day Achilles, Alexander attacked the enormous Persian Empire, ostensibly to avenge the Persian invasions 150 years later.

 

 In a series of brilliant battles, he destroyed the Persian Empire and occupied its vast territories.  His conquests took him even beyond Persian domains into India.  From 323 B.C.E., when Alexander died of a fever (or was poisoned by rivals) at age thirty-two, we date what is known as the Hellenistic Period of Greek History.

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After his death Alexander’s empire quickly broke up into separate and hostile kingdoms, but Greek culture became world culture.  Everything throughout the ancient East—in Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt—cities were established on the Greek model, decorated in the Greek style, rule by Greeks and speakers of Greek.  The cultural capital shifted from Athens to Alexandria, a city Alexander himself had founded in the western delta of Egypt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  In 146 B.C.E, the Greek mainland was conquered by Rome, and other centers of Hellenistic culture met a similar fate in the years that followed.  The end of the period can be dated at 309 B.C.E., when Alexandria fell into Roman hands after the suicide of Cleopatra VII, the last ruling descendent of the generals of Alexander.

 

Professor Page’s Study Questions:   ·       What is the nature of the role of men and women in Ancient Classical Greece? ·       What similarities/differences do you perceive to the roles of men and women in modern American society?

 

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Greek Society: Daily Life

 

 

 

Greek myths reflect the society in which they were transmitted, and to understand them we need to understand something about the social life of Ancient Greece.  Almost all the literary sources are of Athenian origin, and aristocratic men composed almost all.  Unfortunately, our knowledge of Greek society is rather limited.  Most so-called descriptions of Greek social life are really descriptions of Athenian social life of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., although Athens was in many ways a unique community in ancient Greece. [11]

 

 

  Much of Greek social life revolved around the free men who were dominated in both the private and the public spheres.  In classical Athens, there were about 25,000 such men, out of a total population of around 200,000. They held final authority over their wives and the other members of their households.

 

  They alone were obligated to fight in wars, and they alone were eligible to become citizens of the polis. They were prepared for these roles by an education that began in early childhood and taught to them not only to read and write, but also to be athletic, in rigorous control of their appetites, and fearless in battle and the hunt.  An individual man was celebrated for victories over his enemies in war and politics and for his wit and ability to entertain at the all-male symposium, “drinking party,” the Greek man’s principle form of social life and principal setting for the telling of Greek myths.

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  In the Classical Period, when a boy was born, his father was at least thirty years old.  Between ages six and thirteen the boy received instruction from a pedagogue (“trainer of boys”), who taught him how to read, write, and memorize the poetry of Homer and other poets from written texts, which, he could recite before his male friends.  Isolated from the other sex, men in their twenties gathered at the exercise ground to admire the prepubescent boys and to court them through gifts and poetry, a practice called pederasty, “love for boys.”

 

  

 Greek pederasty has no good modern counterparts, and no other facet of ancient Greek social life seems more odd, a measure of our enormous distance from the Greeks of the Classical Period.  Teenage boys also attended the symposium as cupbearers, where such courtship could continue.  If the boy accepted a suitor’s attentions (he need not), he would submit to kissing and fondling and, eventually, to copulation.  In the many surviving pederastic illustrations on pots, the boy, always beardless, is never shown with an erection, whereas the man, always bearded, often has one.  [12]

 

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  Social institutions encouraged the cultivation and refinement of the warrior’s spirit.  In the gymnasium (from Greek gymnos, “naked), the Greek male practiced non-lethal forms of war.  Our tradition of athletics (from Greek athlos, “contest”) began in Greece.  As sport to the Greek was practice for war, war was a kind of sport, and strict rules governed the behavior of the citizen armies.   Competitive rules similar to those regulating Greek warfare extended off the battlefield into every realm of social life.  In the Archaic and Classical periods, a man divided his social relations into clear camps of friends and enemies; a man was measured by richness of gifts to his friends and the thorough punishment he gave to his enemies.  In Athenian tragedy, poets recast ancient myths to reflect contemporary concerns as they competed vigorously for first prize under the critical gaze of their fellow citizens.  In Athenian law courts, one sought not justice, but victory.  The notion of “natural rights” to life or property or happiness or anything else, so prominent in our own thinking simply did not exist.[13]

 

Plato:

 

 

Professor Page’s Study Questions:   ·       What is the essence of Plato’s legacy of dualistic metaphysics? ·       How is this represented in Plato’s “allegory of the cave?” ·       What is meant by the term Platonism?

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Plato’s “Republic and “Allegory of the Cave”

 

 

Professor Page’s Study Questions:   ·       What was the nature of the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses and what role did they play in Greek culture? ·       Did the Greeks believe their myths?  What is the difference between reason and faith?

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Greek Gods and Mythology:

 

 

 

 

"Bacchus"( Dionysus) by Caravaggio.