September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Lecture 1.1 Introduction: the Natural Setting, Geography and Climate

Hello again, and welcome to our course on the ancient Greeks. We are going to be doing a lot of time travel, going back a couple of millennia. But before we do that, we should locate ourselves more firmly In the real world, the world where the Greeks themselves lived. And that world, was in the Mediterranean sea. This is a huge body of water; it extends 2400 miles from the west, at the Strait of Gibraltar, to the east at the Levant, that's about 3,800 kilometers. And from its widest expanse, north to south, it's almost 1,000 miles, or 1,600 kilometers. It's a vast, vast area. People had been talking about Mediterranean civilization, but recently this has come under question. Because we can't really be sure that, in a region this huge, there are any real things that hold them together, that hold the various societies together. So it's not that useful a concept. As we're talking, we will be going through the major events, as we've said, and the major personalities of the ancient Greeks and we'll also be looking at different ways we have come to understand them. Let's get a little bit more precise. Greece itself Is a peninsula, in the Southern Balkans. On one side, it has what is called the Aegean Sea. But it's worth remembering that Greek civilization was, from the very beginning, more expansive than just the mainland. It encompassed the islands, Crete, here to the south, the coast of Turkey, modern day Turkey which was then known as Ionia. They had settlements on the shores of the Black Sea and they had Greek communities as far as southern Italy and Sicily. What is Greece like in terms of it's climate? It's a Mediterranean climate that we can say with some confidence. In other words, long, dry, hot summers, shorter, wetter winters, cooler winters. The geology is primarily limestone, with a lot of other minerals mixed in, especially marble. And the soil is generally fairly good, although very, very stony. We find numerous complaints in ancient Greek literature about how people were trying to plow rocks. The geography of Greece is, as I said, a peninsula, and it's cut almost in half by the gulf of Corinth here. As we'll see this north, south divide plays a great role in Greek history. Within Greece itself the landscape is fairly rugged, although none of the mountains are really huge, they're pretty impressive. Here's a lovely 19th century painting by Edward Dodwell, an English artist, of Mount Parnassus, which was the mythical home of the muses and historically the site of one of the most important Greek religious shrines, that of Delphi. We'll be coming back to that any number of times during our course. And here's a modern view of the same mountain. There are very few navigable rivers. What we have instead, is valleys separated by these mountains. It's hard to think of geography as destiny, but certainly one reason that Greek community organization took the form that it did, of relatively small compact, autonomous units called City-States or Polis,
1 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

probably had a lot to do with the landscape. What was life like? A lot of it had to do with the sea. There is no area in Greece that is farther than some 80 kilometers from the sea. And the Greek coastline is shot through, is carved up I should say, with lots of these small bays and coves, perfect harbors for the ancient sailing ships. The Greeks were always sea peoples. When they weren't at sea, they farmed. And here we meet the famous Mediterranean triad, the three staple elements of the ancient Greek diet, olives, grapes, and grain. Olive trees are relatively hardy, they require some tending, but not too much. They yield one year off, one year on. You can plant other plants among them, like herbs and vegetables, and they can survive for hundreds of years. The olive was terribly important for the ancient Greeks. In myth it was Athena's gift of the olive tree to the Athenians that won her the position as their principal deity. Olives could be eaten for food, they could be cured in brine, and of course they could be pressed for oil, which was used both as a foodstuff and as a cosmetic, and even as a lighting source, because you can burn it in a lamp. In addition to olives, there are grapes. The Greek climate and the Greek landscape are hospitable to olives and vineyards. And the grape itself was, of course, used for wine. And this was under the special protection of the god Dionysus. I've mentioned already that the Greek landscape is very stony. In terms of the larger geography there are not very many big areas for cultivation, there's some up north, in the area of Macedon and Thessaly, some down south, around ancient Sparta. But mainly, Greek farming took place on small subsistence plots. Here we have a wonderful black figure painting from the Louvre, showing some people farming, it's actually plowing the land. Olives, and wine, and grain, wheat, barley, and some corn, these formed the staples, these were the bases of the Greek diet. It's also worth remembering, that from the beginning and throughout Greek history the society had an agricultural base. Even in the highly sophisticated urbanized Athens of the golden age, agriculture was the heart of the community. Looking at this wonderful pot then, also leads us to our next topic, which is how do we know about the events of the ancient past? Much of our evidence is in the form of physical remains, material culture as it's called. Archaeology is what we rely on for what we know about the earliest and indeed most of Greek civilization. Texts are relatively late, and we'll come to that in a little while. But when we're dealing with archaeology of course, we are dealing only with durable materials, only with those things that can survive a couple of millennia in the ground. I sometimes joke with my students about what they are wearing, what of what they have on would survive 2000 years in the ground, not much. Metal perhaps, plastics maybe, but everything else, things that we look to like cloth or leather, almost all gone. So what we have is durable remains like metal, like this wonderful pot handle. Sometimes, although this is rather elegant, it's completely functional, and sometimes of course they are magnificently decorative, like this gold dioxin. But for our purposes
2 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

the most important source of information is probably pottery. Pots are remarkably durable, they last for a very long time, unless you deliberately grind them up and destroy them, they'll just stay where they are. And even if they're broken up we can use them to trace developments by seeing what else appears alongside them within the layers of the ground. Then, as I said a moment ago, we do have some texts, and these are texts of all kinds. Some of them are official, documents on stone, inscriptions from various cities or even occasionally from individuals. Sometimes we, or later on, we have literary texts, which we can use for information. But no matter what we're using, what we always have to do is to find some way to weave all of these things together into a story, into a narrative. It requires interpretation and one of the things that we'll be talking about throughout this course is various ways that we interpret the evidence that we have. I like to think about this in a way that a great 19th century or early 20th century classical scholar Francis Cornford did. He said that the classics are like the sky, they're always the same, but always changing. Because, after all, the planets, the other, the stars, the solar system, the, oh, what am I trying to think of? The galaxies, remain pretty much the same, but our understanding of them changes and keeps changing and we keep re-interpreting them. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to put together a story about the ancient Greeks and the first place we're going to go is the island of Crete. And the great palace site at Knossos and that's where we're going to go to next.

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Lecture 1.2 Minoan Civilization (ca. 1800 1500 BC)

Let's start a little bit out of time, with Homer, who says in The Odyssey, there is a land in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair and rich land called Crete, washed by waves on ever side, densely populated and boasting 90 cities, because today we're going to be talking about Crete. And we're going to be talking primarily about one site in this north-central coast near the modern city of Iraklion and this is a place called Knossos. Crete was home to a great Bronze Age civilization. Remember last time when we talked about archaeology and about durable remains, well now, one of the most durable remains is metal, and metals give their names to large periods of history. We will move From the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, for example. So where are we? We are on Crete, which is sort of the southern shell, if you will, of Greek civilization, and we are here at a place called Knossos. Before we start talking about this site itself and about the history that surrounds it we're going to do a little bit of something with a couple of interpretive models. Remember we also talked about the need for finding ways to interpret the stories that we put together. This may look a little bit complicated at first, but don't panic, it'll be fine. The Peer Polity Model, as it's called, was devised by an archaeologist named Collin Renfrew, and then developed and sophisticated by other archaeologists and scholars. Fundamentally what it means is that you have in a relatively limited area a group of communities that are structured along the same lines. They engage in competition and rivalry, emulation They can also share many things in common, and this is what's called symbolic entrainment, which is just a very, it's a scholarly way of saying that they share certain images and ideals, perhaps divinities. Perhaps standards or morals who knows that we'll figure out later on and they also engage in economic exchange. The reason it's called a peer polity which means that they are in an even level that there is no centralized government. Even though as you'll see we'll come to call this Minoan civilization there was notihing like a capital at Knossos. Instead you had a number of independent communites structred along the same lines that interacted in a variety of complex ways as we will see. So where are we? We're in a place that was dug by a British archeologist named Sir Arthur Evans. Born in 1851, he was the son of a wealthy businessman. He benefited from an outstanding education at the best, one of the best private school, Harrow in England and at Oxford University. He had a sort of a varied career after that, which included serving for a time as keeper, that is director, of the Ashmolian Museum at Oxford. But then, in around 1900, he went to Creed, bought a large section of land, and began to excavate there. And this is what was called Knossos. Not was called, still is called Knossos. It's a massive palace complex. Here, you can see it in an aerial view. There is a great central courtyard surrounded by a variety of
4 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

rooms and other buildings, and there are storage areas out on the outer edges as well. We'll come back to those in a little while. In Greek mythology, this was associated with King Minos. The Greek historian Thucydides, whom we'll be spending a lot of time with in a few weeks, says that Minos was the first who was known to us to have established a navy. Now, Thucydides was writing at a time when navies were very important, especially in his home city of Athens. We'll come back to that too. But Evans, taking his cue from mythology, called this society Minoan, after King Minos. The legend was that Minos, the ancient king, had built a trackless maze called the Labyrinth, in which he imprisoned the bestial, the bull headed, man bodied son of his wife Pasiphae. Minotaur is eventually, as he's called, is eventually killed by the Athenian king Theseus. Some people thought that maybe, this vast palace with, it's jumble of rooms might have been somehow connected with the idea of a Labyrinth. Linguists have shown though, that Labyrinth is actually based on the root of the word labrys. Which means a double-bladed axe. This appears both as artifact and as decorative motif in this palace. Here you can see something that is far from functional, these are beautifully made gold, ceremonial double-bladed axes. And Evan said about constructing or reconstructing or reconstituting as he put it this extraordinary place. I've mentioned already that said that Minos was the first who was known to us to have established a navy. That's clearly a fiction, but what is equally clear is that the Cretans were great sailors. Here you have a wonderful fresco from the site called Akrotiri, not on Crete itself but from, dating from about the same time. Showing a fancifully decorated ship, while around it swim wonderful dolphins, and dolphins, too, are part of the decorative motif in the palace at Knossos this famous dolphin fresco. But even here, we have to start to be cautious. Because scholars have shown this is one of the most famous pictures, I think, that survives from antiquity, and it's up there on the wall. But it was probably originally a floor decoration which Evans and his reconstituters put up in this vertical position to give it better visibility. Nonetheless, Minoan civilization was clearly, deeply involved with sea travel and with overseas trade. And it supported, a fairly lavish lifestyle. But again, we have to be careful. These are all reconstitutions. Evans had his architects, his builders, his workmen rebuild these, put these columns back up, paint them so beautifully. There are wall paintings as well. Of decorative shields. The construction of the palace at Knossos was very sophisticated, with light wells and excellent plumbing, and a general kind of openness, and a sort of elegance. And as I mentioned before, some motifs do appear Here, if you look carefully among the columns on this parapet, you can see yet another bull. And the bull was very, very important in the society. It's important in the myth. It seems to have been important at the time.
5 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

And the Minoans supported a high degree of craftsmanship and technology. This is in the museum at Heraklion, it's a fantastic bull's head drinking cup called a rhyton. But much of it is, an early 20th century reconstruction. We're dealing here, with a story, a powerful story, a story that in fact has taken over. And we can find bits of evidence that seemed to cohere. Again, one of the most famous pieces of art from Knossos is the so-called Bull Leaper fresco, which shows, it seems, something like a sequential action. This may have taken place in the great central courtyard of the palace. Where one athlete grabbed the horns of the bull, as the bull tossed his head to get them off they landed on the back and then if everything went the way it was supposed to they gracefully vaulted off behind it. The sport of kings perhaps. But if you look carefully at this fresco, you can also see how much of it is the result of later restoration. The original bits are the ones that look kind of more beat up. The other parts were all put in by the artists that Evans commissioned. The whole picture of life in Knossos at least as Evans depicted Minoan civilization was one of a peaceful, harmonious perhaps even slightly self indulgent society. Here you have another famous painting The Prince of the Lilies sometimes called The Priest King. Almost all of it was painted later. It was also if you look at it very closely, it's anatomically a little bit odd. The head and the torso don't go quite in the same direction. It's still a wonderful picture, but one has to be careful. Likewise, the famous Three Ladies, as they're called. With their bust revealing dresses, their elaborate hairstyles, their wonderful little smiles are almost all later reconstitution or confection. When the great English writer Evelyn Waugh went to Knossos in the 1930s. He said of the ladies like this that they would be completely at home on the cover of Vogue magazine, and indeed they would. We can figure out a little bit more, perhaps a little bit more solidly, if I may put it that way, about some of the structures of this pure polity We'll look now at the second term here which is a redistributive economy. This again is perhaps an over complicated way of describing something fairly simple. The palace at Knossos had huge storage magazines like this one. Which contained these great jars called pithoid. Some of them as big as a human being. I mean, these are big jars which would have been used to store the produce that was brought in by the people who lived outside the palace, who grew the olives and the grain and the grapes. That Mediterranean triad that we talked about. And legumes and whatever else. They brought it into the palace, where it was stored and then redistributed by the people, the elite, who lived there. The advantage to the growers was that presumably the members of the elite provided some kind of protection for them. And for the people in the palace it gave them foodstuffs, of course, but also gave them something that they could trade. They could engage in the kind of economy, a border economy with other communities, especially those nearest by. There are some works of art From the Minoan period, that actually do give us, like that black figure vase we saw a little while ago, in another lecture, give us some sense of what work might have been like.
6 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

This is the famous Harvester Vase. It's made out of black steatite. It's a black stone. And carved in high relief, it shows a procession. Of workers who are carrying over their shoulders the long sticks that they would use to knock the olives from the trees, knock them into sheets and then gather them for harvest. How did they keep track of all of this? This is also very important. The people at Knossos were literate. They had two kinds of scripts. An earlier called Linear-A, not much of which survives and which still hasn't been deciphered and then later called Linear-B which was deciphered in the 1950s by some English scholars. This is a clay tablet, a linear B tablet that was found in Knossos. And when these tablets were deciphered, what was discovered was, and this was very exciting and very important, was that they're a kind of proto-Greek. They're a syllabary. Each one of these little signs stands for a syllable. And you find things like [FOREIGN] which means wine, comes into historical Greek as Or [FOREIGN] which means lord comes into historical Greek as [FOREIGN] which means Lord or king. These were storehouse records. They have no narrative drive. But they are invaluable. In terms of allowing us to chart a kind of historical evolution. And to get at least some sense of what the social structure was like in this community. What we know is that the palace culture, now called Minoan, thrived from roughly 1700 to about 1400. It was this period, those 300 years, it was the time of the art works, the technology, the trade, the high point, so to speak, of Minoan society. [INAUDIBLE] . Then, at around 1500 or 1450, it collapses. There is widespread evidence of destruction at all of those sites around the island, at almost the same time. Theories abound as to why this occurred. Was a natural catastrophe? This is a very seismically active earthquake-prone zone. Was it some kind of revolution, the people who were living outside the palaces finally decided they had enough of the redistributive economy and decided to redistribute it to themselves? Or, it seems most likely, was it invasion? Or some combination perhaps of all of these, but we'd still have to answer the question now, what is Minoan? Before Arthur Evans there was no such thing as Minoan civilization. One great modern historian of the ancient world has said That Minoan civilization is the only great civilization created in the 20th century. Evans had a powerful vision of a peaceful maritime monarchy with friendly relations on its own island. So peaceful, in fact, Evans claimed, that it didn't need fortification. But archaelogists have found, long since, evidence of fortification, of defensive walls. It's also Evans who planted, around the site at Knossos, these trees. There by setting it off as a kind of shrine from its natural surroundings, from the farms and the vineyards and the olive groves that must've supported it. I don't want to dismiss this entirely as a lie. That would be silly and be stupid. We don't need to do that. But what we do need to do is to think about how evidence can be constructed or reconstituted to create something that has had enormous staying power. Any standard textbook of ancient Greek history will now include the Minoan period as part of the Bronze Age history.
7 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

What I've tried to do, in these few minutes is to give you some sense of the complicated genesis, of this remarkable society, and of our understanding of it. Next time we're going to move to the people who might have wreaked it, and that is the mainland communities now called Mycenaean.

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Lecture 1.3 Mycenaean Civilization (ca. 1500 1150 BC)

We spoke last time about the Minoan civilization, about its slightly troubled past that is, at least in terms of its archaeology and history, about the vision of Sir Arthur Evans, the excavator there. And how it shaped what he did at Knossos. We also mentioned a couple of larger, sort of thematic issues, or interpretive issues such as the peer-polity model, re-distributive economy, etcetera. We're going to be coming back to some of those. Because now, we're going to move from Crete, up onto the mainland, and to this site, called Mycenes. As with Minoans, so with Mycenian, we have to remember that these are just labels of convenience. This was a peer polity situation. That is you had a number of communities that were organized along the same lines, engaged in competition and emulation with each other, shared certain cultural values, and engaged in some kind of trade. As we look at the site of Mycenae itself, one of the things I think we're first struck by, is the fact that it is on top of this hill. It's a fairly steep hill. The Mycenaean sites share a general predilection, a preference for, a location that can be easily defended, and a location that has access to ample fresh water. Mycenes itself, for example, has not one, but two springs supplying it. As on Crete, so on the mainland, we have a charismatic archaeologist, whose name is forever to be linked with this site. In this instance, it's the German, Heinrich Schliemann. Born in 1822, he made his fortune as a very successful international businessman. He traveled quite widely, including to Russia and the United States, he knew any number of foreign languages, estimates vary.

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

And then, having made his fortune in middle age, he decided that he wanted to devote his life to archaeology. There's a whole mythology around Schliemann, about how, when he was a child at his dad's knee, his Dad had infused him with a love for Homer. Eh, probably not, but he none the less set about trying to define what Homeric reality might have been like, trying to locate the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey in the real world. He went first, to Troy, as he said. And he found a site in the northwest corner of modern day Turkey, called Hissarlik. And as he dug down he found a stratum, roughly about the time of what the legendary Trojan war would have been. And he found there an enormous amount of treasure, which, of course, he called Priam's treasure, After the name of, king of Troy, in the Iliad. And here you see Schliemann's young wife, Sophia, wearing some of the jewelry that he found there. This was a spectacular, popular hit, news of the excavations at Troy were diffused through the popular press. Schliemann became, one might say, an international celebrity. He then moved on to the Greek mainland, to the ancient Bronze Age site of Mycenae. You can see him here, perched on top of one of the great walls next to the famous Lion Gate, which is the main entrance to this site with a number of, another archeaologist. And we can identify Dorpfeld up there in the little window. And in 1874, Schliemann again, at least allegedly, claiming to be guided by the voice of Homer, began to excavate at Mycenae. Now one of the things that you probably have noticed already is how very different the construction is here from what it was at Knossos. Here, this is clearly built for defense, I've mentioned this already. And in fact, these massive stones are so big that they came to be called Cyclopian.

10

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Because it was thought that only a creature as big as a cyclops, massive and massively muscled, could've carved these stones and lifted them into place. As Schliemann began his excavation, he found a grave circle, quite unusually within the city walls, usually cemeteries are outside the city. And these graves had a number of distinctive features. They were marked with upright slabs, tombstones, gravestones, called stelae, like this one. With carvings, many of them, in high relief, this one showing some kind of battle scene, it seems, with a warrior and a chariot about to spear another warrior standing on the ground. The whole content of Mycenean art is much more aggressive as we'll see, then that of Minoan art, even in the condition that we have it. These stelae were meant to mark out graves. Some people have called them sort of imaginary doors to the underworld, the boundary markers between the world of the living and the world of the dead. There are no names on any of these. The elite who were buried here didn't leave behind any identification. What they did leave behind, however, was gold, an enormous quantity and extraordinary quality. Among the most famous things that Schliemann found were funeral masks such as this one, which were put over the face of the deceased. Or, this one, which has come to be called the mask of Agamemnon, the famous Greek hero who figures so large in the Iliad. As with Arthur Evans, however, there's some questions about Schliemann. This mask, for example, is unlike any of the others that were found. If you think about the one we just saw a second ago it's much rounder. This one has unique features, such as these eyes, that look like they're simultaneously open and closed. The elegant, up-curling mustache, the fact that the ears are separated from the surrounding panel.
11 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Some people have gone so far as to claim that Schliemann had this made, by a contemporary goldsmith and simply put it in the find. Some people still very much believe this, I'm less persuaded. I think that what has happened, is as one scholar has suggested, that this was a genuine find that was, so to speak, cleaned up, or to use Arthur Evans' term, reconstituted. It is an extraordinarily elegant piece. Schliemann's reputation is, among some people somewhere between sketchy and nefarious. I don't want to go into that right now because what I'd like to do, is to concentrate on what he found, which as I say, was gold in abundance. Those members of the elite who had themselves interred in these deep shaft graves, called cyst graves, took with them treasure in enormous quantity. The Mycenaean Lords supported this high degree of craftsmanship and the people who could make it. Here's another set from the Archaeological Museum in Athens. These were used both for personal adornment and display and they played a very important role in trade. At this time Greece was very much part of a network of East Aegean Economies. It didn't look that different from places in the middle east, with a ruling elite, an agricultural base, production of luxury goods. And these luxury goods circulated among the members of this class no matter where they were living, in Greece, or elsewhere. Sometime, somebody commissioned this extraordinary bulls head rhyton, it might remind you of the one we saw from Knossos. Gold horns, beautiful gold rosette on the forehead. Or this dagger, this is actually a relatively small piece, not much bigger than this. But with this intricate inlay of gold and silver showing a hunting scene, again that, that hint of violence, more than a hint.

12

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Some time after the cyst graves, and the, of the grave circles, the Mycenaeans constructed those enormous cyclopian walls and they also began to treat their dead somewhat differently from before. Instead of the cyst graves, now they enhumed their dead or they buried, I shouldn't say enhumed, but they buried their dead in these massive tombs called tholos tombs. These have a long runway, these are built into the side of a hill. They have a long runway, this one, the so called Treasury of Atreus, is some 115 feet long, what would that be about 45 meters, is very long. The interior has a dome, a bee hived shape dome, we'll see that in a second, some 38 feet high. And it's been estimated that this single piece of stone above the doorway, might way as much as 100 tons. Again, vast amounts of anonymous labor must have been conscripted to make this. Here's the view inside. And what's extraordinary as well is, that every time it seems, that a burial is performed here, they have to dig out that whole long entry way, which had been covered in after the last burial. Then the deceased were brought in, put in a pit inside here, their goods burned on a pyre above them, and then, it was sealed up until the next time. This provides evidence of tremendous social stratification. The picture that we get, is of a warrior elite, at the top of the social pyramid, engaged in rivalry with other elites nearby. Some kind of international, if I can use that anachronistic term, trade with others of their class elsewhere. And also supporting technologies, not only of gold, but of literacy, because like the Minoans the Myceneans were literate. In the proto-Greek that we call linear B, here is a Mycenaean linear B tablet. It's one of the little ironies that the flames that engulfed the Mycenaean Citadels baked these clay tablets, which were never meant to be preserved for a very long time.

13

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

They were just sort of temporary notations of storehouse contents, and saved them for us. Archaeologists love catastrophe, it leaves them a rich deposit on which to work. But we also get indications of social unrest or at least of high military preparedness. One of the most famous pieces of art from the Mycenaean times, is the so-called warrior vase showing men with spears in their right hands, shields over their left arms, some kind of armor. I want you to look especially carefully at the helmets. Because one of the most extraordinary objects that survives is a boar's tusk helmet, that is in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. And this is, Homer describes this kind of helmet. He talks about his warriors wearing this sort of headgear to protect themselves. Whatever the cause, we'll talk about that more next time, Mycenaean civilization underwent a sudden, massive systemic collapse. Between 1200 and 1150 BCE, in one citadel site after another, we find evidence of burning, and pillaging, and destruction. The inhabitants were killed or dispersed. Their homes left for scavenging, maybe for people who are just sort of camping out there from then on. Next time we'll talk about some of the reasons why this might have happened and what happened afterward.

14

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Lecture 1.4 The Dark Ages (ca. 1150 800 BC)

As we were saying at the end of last lecture, Mycenaean civilization collapsed rapidly and systemically. One site after another on the mainland show signs of pillaging and burning. Who did it? What caused this collapse? They're any number of theories. We're now back to our site at Mycenae, we will look at this for a little bit. But scholars have suggested any number of possibilities as to what might have happened and what, what created this drastic change. One possibility is climatic, that there was an enormous drought. So, what we have to do is we have to explain why this happened over a relatively broad area at about the same time. You have to find an explanation that is, that goes beyond just simply one place that might have been knocked over by a neighbor. So, one possibility is drought. Another possibility, and we talked about this a little bit in connection with the Minoans as well, is internal revolt. But that seems a little less likely just because, how would you have this in one sight after another? You don't have a sort of unified proletariat at this time. Another possibility is economic disruption. This period, around 1200 BCE, is a time of tremendous stress in the entire eastern Mediterranean. There are records from the Levant and elsewhere that talk about the arrival of the sea people, and that clearly they're making trouble. Economic disruption would have taken the form of a break in those systems of trade among the elite that we were talking about a little bit. And some scholars have said that the economy was so fragile, so to speak, that when those networks were disrupted, everything else went smash. Another possibility is invasion. It's been shown that when people of a somewhat less developed culture invade people of a more developed culture, the invaders don't tend to leave many traces of their presence, except for the destruction that they cause. It's another possibility or it might be some combination of all of these. There used to be a theory called the Dorian Invasion, that is, that people swept in from the north, wrecked the Mycenaean sides. This is based largely on one passage in the historian Thucydides, and it has only one big problem with it. There's no evidence. It's been abandoned. There's a wonderful theory, it was so neat. It worked perfectly as a story. Nobody really much believes it anymore. So, you have to figure out for yourselves, we'll have to figure out for ourselves, why this collapse occurred. But, we can be absolutely certain of one thing. And that is that it did occur. There's another question, kind of connected with that, which is, why did it last so long? If you think of the collapse of the Mycenaean society as occurring at around 1150, it stays depressed. Stays dark for almost 300 years. That's a very long time. One explanation that's been offered is that Mycenae, of course, was dependent on it's agriculture. You've seen what the site is like and what many of these sites are like, that is on the top of fairly steep hills. In order to do agriculture in such an area, you have to do terracing. You have to cut into the side of
15 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

the hills and create flat places where olives, grapes and grain, vegetables, etc., can be grown. This is an image from modern, modern day Italy, giving you some idea of what this might have looked like. But terraces require an enourmous amount of labour to construct and they require constant maintenance. Once the society had been, so to speak, beheaded and the inhabitants either killed or dispersed, if animals got loose as they certainly did on the terraces, they would quickly wear them down. Even though there's not a great deal of rainfall, that would have contributed to the erosion as well. So that it would have become very, very difficult, indeed impossible, to do the kind of intensive agriculture that you needed to support a community, as in one of those citadels. Another explanation is societal, and that is control of fertility. We have to think now of what life might have been like at this time, small groups moving from place to place. I'll come back with, come back to this in a moment or two. But for groups like that, relatively small populations are actually beneficial. They help with survival, fewer mouths to feed. And so, the control of female fertility, for example, by waiting for girls to get somewhat older before they can be married off and start having children of their own. This may be another reason that this that the Dark Ages lasted so long. What we know is that the effects were devastating. There was a tremendous drop in population. We can tell this from the number of graves. Gravesites become fewer and much farther between. We'll come back to this as well in a little while. You remember all that beautiful gold work that we saw in the extraordinary metal work as in the inlaid dagger and the like? It stops. There's no support for this anymore. The craftsmen who had been working for the elite, those folks who had themselves buried in the great beehive tombs, had no one to work for anymore. And the technology simply dropped away, as did international trade. It used to be that Mycenaean artifacts were found all over the eastern Mediterranean, it stopped. Not even much pottery. Pottery continues to be made, of course, but not even much pottery is found. Those trade networks that had grown up collapsed, disentgrated. This one other thing that goes missing as well, although it's suprising, and that is literacy. The Mycenaean linear B had been, it's a fairly clumsy form. It's 87 characters. It takes a while to memorize. It had been used almost exclusively, as I have said, to record the contents of the storehouses and warehouses of the citadels. When those were emptied, the technology that was used to record their contents vanished. It had been restricted to a very small number of scribes and they simply had no work anymore. It's always a little bit tough to talk about culture decline. Makes one a little bit uneasy. But in this instance, I think it is unmistakable that we are seeing a massive systemic decline, and I've used the word several times now, collapse. So, what was life like after this? Well, it continued certainly. You might have had small groups of squatters in the once great citadel. But the image that we have is largely of small groups living a kind of
16 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

semi-nomadic existence. Perhaps, staying in a place just long enough to grow a few crops maybe for one or two planting seasons, and then moving on. Subsistence agriculture, and life in the ruins. It's not to say, again, that activity stopped completely. It's at this time, around 1000 BCE, that the Greeks start to shift population from the mainland across the islands to the coast of Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, which was then called Ionia, we've mentioned this before. And that theory that I was talking about a couple of minutes ago about the Dorian invasion, see this is, it was so tidy. The Dorians sweep in from the north. They boot the Ionians out. The Ionians go eastward. It's lovely. No evidence. There must have been some displacement of populations, but we cannot think of this as an organized invasion and migration. Instead, small groups, one by one, made their way across this chain of islands and established their communities here. Another thing that happens is, surprisingly, an advance in technology and that is we're going to, what we're seeing is the shift from the bronze age to the iron age. Iron is much harder in every sense of the term. It's physically more durable, It's harder to find, it's harder to work. I put this map up because one of the most important iron age sites is way over in the east Mediterranean on the island of Cyprus. The Greeks made this long voyage over here to get iron. One sign of, that's still relatively recent, we can see in Homer, about whom we'll be talking much more in the next couple of lectures. When Achilles offers prizes at the games for the funeral of his beloved companion Patroclus, one of the prizes he offers is a lump of gleaming pig iron that will last a man for five years. And this was clearly thought to be a kind of treasure. Life, as I said, for most of the people at this time, to use Thomas Hobbe's famous expression, was probably solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But then, somehow there always seems to be an outlier. In 1981, archaeologists working on the island of Euboea, which is just off the northeast coast of Attica, here's Athens right here, in a place called Lefkandi, made an extraordinary find. This is what it looks like now. Not too impressive, is it? But you have to use a kind of archaeological imagination to reconstruct it. In fact, it was a massive burial place. Shaped sort of like this. It's about 150 feet long, that is about 45 meters, and about 40 feet side to side. This is huge. Moreover, its construction is very unusual. There's a base stone course, then mud brick, and then wood pilings on top of that. And within this place were found two burial pits. One of them containing the cremated body of a male with an iron spear, along with the buried body of a female, who had lavish gold ornamentation. In the other pit were buried four horses, two of which had iron bits in their mouths. And then, to complete this extraordinary picture, this was not a palace. This was a tomb, which was constructed. The inhabitants were buried. And then, it was deliberately covered up again.

17

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

It's been suggested that it might have become a kind of hero shrine for this nobleman and perhaps his wife, who knows, who had once died. There's nothing like this anywhere else on Euboea or on the Greek mainland. As one scholar has said, it was some noble's last hurrah. An enormous, extraordinary expression of disposal wealth and material wealth material power, domination. Because as with so much else that we've seen, there were a whole of people without names who worked on this. Also found there was one of the most wonderful little pieces of ancient sculpture, a centaur, decorated in geometric motif. One of the great things about it is that he has a deliberate wound on his left knee, something the original potter did. This was incidentally, in antiquity, broken in two and put in two different places, and archaeologists found it and reconstructed it. One of the famous centaurs of antiquity is Chiron, who was the tutor for many of the great heroes. And with that mention of heroes, I'm going to stop. Because for the next couple of lectures, we're going to be talking about the heroic world of Homer. Because the other thing that happened during the period of the Dark Ages was that there grew a tradition of tales, of stories, told and retold in the form of poems. And they come down to us as the epics that we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

18

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Lecture 1.5 Homer 1 Illiad

You know, we've gone through several hundred years of history already, and that's fine. But it's somehow more daunting than anything to try to talk about a work as complex as the Iliad or the Odyssey in the relatively short time that we have available to us in these lectures. I'm not going to try to sum up the story. It's far to complicated for that. Instead, what I would like to do is to talk with you about how we've come to understand Homer in terms of the way he conveys a vision of a society and its values. The back story may be familiar to you. Here depicted on a vase painting where the Trojan prince Paris is asked by three goddesses to judge essentially a beauty contest, which of them is the most attractive, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. Each of them tries to bribe him. And Aphrodite offered him the most beautiful woman in the world and so he chooses her to be the most beautiful of the goddesses. Unfortunately, the most beautiful woman in the world is Helen, who is married to Menelaus, who is king of Sparta. When Paris goes to visit the royal couple, Helen takes off with him. They go to Troy and the Greeks mount a war of revenge to get her back. So, the setting for this great poem is war and all of its horror, its nobility, its baseness, and its glory. Before we start talking about that, we can go back to yet another one of the figures that we've already met, and that's Heinrich Schliemann. Remember, he was the German archaeologist, business man archaeologist, who excavated at Mycenae. Four years before going to Mycenae, he excavated at a site that he was sure was Troy. Modern day Hissarlik in the northwest corner of Turkey, right near the Dardanelles. Schliemann dug down into a great mound there, and just at about the place that he thought he would, he ran across a stratum burned, destroyed buildings, also a tremendous amount of jewelry. And he was convinced that he had found Troy. There's a lot of debate about whether there was actually a Trojan war and I'm not going to get into that now. But, there may have been, preserved by Homer, some remnant of a genuine historical event. Certainly, all of the heroes whom we'll be talking about, Achilles and Agamemnon and Hector, those are depictions. That doesn't mean that they're not important, of course. We'll come back to all of this as we go through. I want to give you a little sense of what this poem might have sounded like. These are the first five lines of The Iliad. I'm going to exaggerate the beat a little bit, just so you get some sense of the rhythm of what's called dactylic hexameter, which is the meter that these poems were composed in and it goes. And the translation a little bit lumpy which I've put up here. Although literal, is, the wrath, sing, o goddess, of Peleus's son Achilles, carrying doom, which brought countless sorrows to the Achaians, and sent many brave souls of heroes to Hades, and left the rest as spoils for all dogs and birds, and the will of Zeus was fulfilled. These lines have come down to us over the millennia. It seems that Homer, whoever he was or whoever they were, I'll come back to that in a moment, likeliest composed first in the eighth century BCE, that is the 700s. Homer is
19 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

identified in the Romantic imagination as a blind bard from the island of Chios, just off the coast of Asia minor. This was partly because there is a blind bard in the Odyssey when Demodocus, and partly because an early poem, one of the so called Homeric hymns, talks about a blind bard of Chios. And for the longest period in the history of these poems, it was thought that there was a single great poet named Homer. I want to emphasize now, at the very beginning, the cultural importance of Homer. There is, I think very little, by way of a similarly dominant figure in other world literatures. For the Greeks Homer was the poet. Whenever subsequent authors talk about the poet, there's only one the poet that they're talking about. If you look for Homer in subsequent works of history, philosophy, tragedy, even comedy, you'll find him. Memorizing Homer was part of the education of any reasonably well brought up young Greek man. And this will also be very important for us because, knowing Homer was one of the most important ways that Greek society started to define itself at the end of the Dark Ages, the beginning of what's called the Archaic Age. We'll spend more time there later on, when Greeks separated themselves culturally from the rest of the eastern Mediterranean societies. So, what do we know about Homer? Not much. The great, great breakthrough in Homeric studies was made in the 1930's by a young American scholar named Milman Parry, then an assistant professor at Harvard. He had a theory that brought him to central Europe where he recorded Yugoslav bards singing great long poems. And what he found there, was that the bards didn't make these up as they went along. You can't do that. The Iliad is some 16,000 lines of verse. The Odyssey, some 12,000. You can't make this up as you go along. What the bards had, as they did what's called oral composition, was a set, a huge set to be sure, of one might call a database of premade phrases. Some of them are just two words. You saw one, although you didn't recognize it, in the first line of the Illiad. That two-word phrase, Peleus's son Achilles, [foreign] fits into this rhythm. This is what's called an epithet. That is an adjective attached to a name. And as you're reading Homer, you're probably struck by the enormous amount of repetition. So, that you have swift foot Achilles, or Achilles, son of Peleus, or grey-eyed Athena, or Zeus of the thunderbolt, et cetera. So, these are, these combinations of formulas in terms of epithets. But the formulas can be much more extensive as well. Sometimes a few words, he spoke answering him. Sometimes much more extensive even than that. So, a description of a sacrifice, is repeated again and again. This is the way these bards composed. And again, I just want to emphasize the importance of this kind of poetry, as a conveyor of cultural values, of cultural memory. Bards are heroes. But it's not just the bards that are heroes because in those very first few lines of the Iliad we hear that the wrath of Peleus's son sent many brave souls of heroes to Hades. Who were the heroes? When we use the word hero today, we generally think of somebody who demonstrates extraordinary virtue or courage under

20

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

extraordinary circumstances. For the ancient Greeks heroism was not a kind of moral accomplishment, but was a status. What made you a hero? You were the son of a hero. Genealogy is the first, first criteria. In addition to that, you tended to be tall, and good looking. You had military courage. You had a group of retainers who would follow you with sort of unquestionable loyalty. And, you, like Achilles here depicted in his departure from his homeland, had constantly to prove yourself because this is a world of contest and competition. Heroism is in some ways a remarkably fragile status. It is constantly being tested. It's sort of a zero, a zero-sum game, as it's called, because anything that I win, you pretty much lose. We have constantly, all of us, to display arete, which can be translated as virtue or excellence. When we're really at our height, we're in a condition called aristeia, which means being at one's best. In combat, this means, as I sometimes joke, that you grow and glow. You take on a kind of superhuman power. You're compared to fire. Achilles has an aristeia in the Iliad that sort of involves the natural world. He starts fighting the river's commander because he is so far beyond himself. And what you hope to gain from all of this is kleos. Which is the word that means glory or renown. This is what heroes long for, yearn for, fight for, and strive for. So what happens? Well, sometimes the competition can take the form a friendly competition. One of the most common motifs, a very popular motif in vase painting, believe it or not, shows the two great Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax, having set their armor aside but holding onto their spears. And they're playing a kind of board game like chess or checkers. Nobody's quite sure what it was. But of course, it's really combat where heroes prove themselves. This is a representation of a scene which doesn't occur in the Illiad. It took place in another epic which has perished from the Itheos, and it shows Achilles fighting an Ethiopian warrior named Memnon. And if you look very closely, you can see on either side, their mothers are watching. The Iliad is a dominantly male poem. Women do appear, but they tend to be tokens that are exchanged. There's Helen of course, who had taken off with Paris, prince of Troy. There is also, at the beginning of the poem, Chryseis, the daughter of the priest of Apollo whom Agamemnon has taken. When he has to give her back, in a supreme display of ill temper, he takes Achilles' prize. This is what sets Achilles rage going. For a hero to be insulted like this, in public, is probably the worst thing that can happen. It is literally a fate worse than death. What happens is that Achilles withdraws from battle. Here, he is shown in a beautiful red figure vase tending the wound of his beloved companion, Patroclus. And when Achilles withdraws, the whole world is upset, the world of the Achaean warriors. And one of the ways that we can see how bad things have gotten, and I hope you all had a chance to read this in book two, there's a chaotic assembly. And who speaks up? The one named member of the mass, otherwise anonymous of regular warriors, one Thersites. He's not a hero. He is, if anything, an anti-hero. He's described as the
21 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

ugliest man ever to appear under the walls of Troy. What he says is what Achilles has been saying, that Agamemnon is greedy, a bully, shouldn't behave the way he does. But Thersites doesn't have the right to say it and he is clubbed back into silence by Odysseus. Before we get too sentimental about this incidentally, the reaction of the other Greek soldiers should in form, ours. Instead of expressing sympathy for their fellow soldier, what they say is, this is an excellent thing Odysseus has done. Because when somebody like Thersites can speak up, it means that the world is sort of spinning out of control. As Achilles maintains his isolation, Agamemnon finally realizes that he has to get him back. And they send an embassy to try to get Achilles back. It doesn't work. But, what it does demonstrate is yet another one of these Homeric values, or, I should say attention in Homeric society. Who are you loyal to? Are you loyal to your family, to your community to your army? Here, Achilles, muffled, is maintaining his rage and his isolation. And in book nine of the Iliad, he makes a typically Achillean statement. He says, why should I fight? We all wind up dead anyhow. The heroic code to gain glory or to be more blunt, to help one's friends and to hurt one's enemies, is here undercut by the simple remark about mortality. Eventually though, Achilles has to come back into battle. And he does. And he faces off against the Trojans' great champion, Hector, whom we have seen on the battlefield. He is the son of Priam. He is the greatest of the Trojan warriors. And Achilles has been told that when he kills Hector, his own death will follow soon. He's willing to take that on because Hector has killed Patroclus. In the excess of rage and grief, Achilles tries to mutilate Hector's body, by dragging him around the walls of Troy, latched onto his chariot. The gods preserved the corpse from exfoliation. And then, at the very end, there's an extraordinary scene here represented in a fragment of a vase, when the old king of Troy, Priam, who has lost so much, comes to Achilles to beg for the return of the corpse of his son. The Iliad is a poem about the glory and the sorrow of war. Achilles and Priam share a moment of common grieving for all they have lost. Achilles does return the corpse to the king. And the poem that had begun with, sing, muse, the wrath of Achilles, ends with, that was the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses. The poet has taken a set of stories that he has inherited, that have been told and retold. We talked about how literacy died out, disappeared during the dark ages, and has given us one of the first, really the first and still one of the greatest monuments in the literature of the West. We'll now go on to talk about the other great Homeric poem, the Odyssey, which is very different in scope and tone.

22

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Lecture 1.6 Homer 2 Odyssey

The Iliad ends under a haze of smoke from a funeral pyre. And really one of the striking things about the Trojan War is how in subsequent literature, it's not the good war. It's depicted as being sort of catastrophic for both victims and victors alike. But, there is another epic attached to it. And that is the Odyssey. Generally thought to be a little bit later than the Iliad. Perhaps composed by a bard, or brought into some sort of compositional unity by a master bard who took a whole bunch of different stories and brought them together. And we talked a little bit last time about theories of Homeric authorship and how they have changed. But the Oddessey has a very different tone from the Illeiad. In fact, its hero, Odysseus, has been called an atypical hero. This may or may not be Odysseus. Some people identify this little figure as being the hero himself. But what makes him an atypical hero? Well, he's short, unlike say Achilles or Ajax or Hector, are always described as being towering. He's clever. He's eloquent. He's a master of words. In that embassy to Achilles, Odysseus is one of the lead ambassadors. And Achilles says to him, with scarcely concealed irritation. I hate like the gates of Hades the man who says one thing and keeps another in his heart. Well, that's Odysseus all over. So he's short. He's clever. He's eloquent. He's tricky. It's Odysseus who's credited with the ruse of the Trojan horse, which doesn't appear in either of the surviving epics. But which we know about from, of course, from other stories. He's curious. The beginning of the Odyssey is tell me, muse, of a man of many turnings, polytropon. We'll come back to that in a moment. And Odysseus is a man of twists and turns. He is also, and quite unusually, interested in food. There's no other hero who talks so much about eating as does Odysseus. And in fact, the Odyssey has been described, and I think accurately, as a poem of appetite versus intelligence. In a very real sense, you are what you eat and how you eat it. And we'll come back to that too. Moreover, Odysseus's weapon of choice is the bow. He's a great archer. Now, what is it about the bow? Well, it puts you at a little bit safer distance from the enemy than does hand to hand combat with sword. And spear and shield. So Odysseus, after the fall of Troy, wanders trying to make his way home and to bring his companions safely home. This is also from the first few lines of the Odyssey. And on his travels, Homer says, he saw the towns and learned the minds of many different men. What has happened at home is trouble, and we'll come back to that in a moment. But I want to introduce you, introduce to you three more key terms. One of them is metis. And this is a particular
23 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

kind of cunning intelligence. It's different from wisdom. It's different even from a kind of theoretical philosophical intelligence. This is a kind of tricky, conniving intelligence.

And that's Odysseus all over, too. I mentioned a moment ago, this term polytropos, meaning versatile, adaptable and even well traveled. That's Odysseus too. But another key element of the Odyssey is a very important cultural value called xenia. This is the ritualized exchange between a host and a guest. This is one of the most important cultural values that the Homeric poems convey. To give you just one very small example, in Book Five of the Iliad, a Greek warrior named Diomedes is in a condition of aristeia. He's killing every Trojan who gets in his way. And he finally winds up face to face with a Trojan named Glaucus. And Diomedes says, tell me who you are so you, so I'll know who I'm killing. And Glaucus says, give me a break or something, the Greek equivalent of it. And tells him his lineage. And as Glaucus describes his family. Diomedes, who, remember, has been in a killing fury, says, from now on, we must avoid each other on the battlefield. Why? Because their grandfathers had shared xenia. This is in a world of constant contest, strife, the need to excel. This a very important break on that. But what has happened in Odysseus' absence in his palace at Ithica is that a number of suitors have settled in to woo his wife, Penelope, who is, after all, thought to be an eligible widow. And what they do is take and eat, and take and eat without any gesture at reciprocity. They're living in a constant violation of xenia. And there's nobody there, not even Odysseus's son Telemachus, who can get rid of them, at least not yet. Where's Odysseus been? He's been on the island of Calypso. And he's been living a life of total, one might say, physical satisfaction. She's beautiful, she's a nymph, they have sex a lot. And yet what does he do? He often just sits on the shore weeping. And as soon as he can, he takes the opportunity to leave. Because a life of total physical satisfaction but without any kind of glory is not a life a hero can live. And then he lands on the island of Phiecia, is drawn slowly back into society. And we have probably the best known part of the Odyssey, the so called Adventure Books. These are interwoven tales. They have some folktale motifs, but we can group them roughly. And there are three groups of three, interrupted with a trip to the underworld. And in those three groups of three there are, they're characterized. Each tale is characterized, I'm sorry, I should say, by a monster or by temptation or by folly. The monsters are generally identified as cannibals. And the most famous is certainly the huge one-eyed monster Polyphemus. The description that Odysseus gives of his interaction with

24

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

Polyphemus involves not only xenia and its violations. I mean, Polyphemus isn't a great host, he starts killing Odysseus's men and eating them. Odysseus isn't a great guest, he comes in and starts stealing stuff. But even more than that, there are some hints of the social reality of the time. The island on which Polyphemus lives, is described as having a good harbor, plentiful timber, good water supply. We'll see in a lecture or two that the Greeks are starting to send out colonies now into the Mediterranean. And this is a perfect site to set up a colony. But even more important than that, the cyclops is described as not eating bread, and as not performing sacrifice. A great french scholar, Pierre Vidal Naquet, has analyzed this. And he has pointed out that not eating bread means that the cyclops don't do agricultural labor. And the fact that they don't perform sacrifice means that they don't recognize the importance of the gods. These two characteristics, that is, not doing farmwork and not recognizing the gods, marks the cyclops as inhuman. Even more than does his enormous size and canabalistic appetite and single eye in the middle of his forehead. Using cunning, cleverness, Oddyseus and his men blind the cyclops and manage to escape. But as he's leaving, Odysseus taunts the cyclops. Up to this point, Odysseus has called himself. Ootus, no man. But now he says, you can tell the other cyclopes that the one who blinded you is Odysseus. Bad mistake, it's a bad point for Odysseus to claim his identity, because it give the cyclops the opportunity to curse him. If cyclops called that a curse on no man, of course it wouldn't work. But the cyclops's father is the great god of earth and sea, Poseidon, and he's furious. And Odysseus is set a wandering with Poseidon, Poseidon's rage kind of overshadowing him. Odysseus also meets temptation in various forms. Probably the most famous is in the form of the witch, Circe, who turns his men, by means of a magic potion, into swine. And we could hardly have a clearer illustration of what I was talking about, in terms of appetite versus intelligence. Odysseus gets a little bit of divine assistance, manages to overcome Circe. But she sends him on a quest, and the quest is to the underworld. This is Book 11 of the Odyssey, and it gives us our first and in many ways, the most detailed description. Of what life was thought to be like after one died. It's not hell. That is, it's not a place of constant torment. It is instead a place that's cold, it's dark. And people exist in a kind of shadow form of themselves. When Odysseus descends to the underworld, he meets some of his former companions from the war at Troy. There's Agamemnon, who has been killed by his treacherous wife, Clytemnestra. There's always a tension in this poem about what's really going to happen when Odysseus gets home. That we know, so to speak, what's
25 Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

going to happen. But the, the poem keeps setting up a counter possibility, that faithful Penelope might not turn out to be so faithful after all. And maybe, like, Chlytemestra, wind up killing her hero husband when he finally shows up. Odysseus also sees Achilles. And with that same kind of directness that he had shown in the Iliad, Achilles says to him, what are you doing here? Odysseus says we're on a quest and he says, you have everything a hero could want. You have a great reputation. You have fame. You have clay offs everywhere. You have a son who's carrying on after you. And Achilles says, don't talk to me so lightly of death. You get to go back. And then in one of the most striking sentences in all of the Odyssey, Achilles says I would rather be a live serf. That is the lowest form of free agricultural laborer. I'd rather be a live serf than a dead hero. So much for the heroic code. And then Odysseus sees Ajax, who had committed suicide after Odysseus had cheated him out of Achilles armor. Ajax just refuses to talk to him. Even in the underworld, that help your friends in hurt your enemies, that code persists. Odysseus also faces instances of folly, but sometimes manages to follow instructions. A famous scene has him fill his men's ears with wax. And he has then tied himself to a mast so he can listen to the song of the sirens, who otherwise lure ships to destruction on the rocks. Some wonderful paintings shows a siren with a harp. And people have suggested that what she might be singing is heroic verse. The songs of the heroes, like Homer. The Odyssey is full of these folk tales which are sort of spun into the main narrative. And when Odysseus gets back to Ithaca he has to find out who's been loyal and who hasn't. And so he disguises himself as a beggar. The whole question of recognition and identity comes to the fore. Odysseus has managed to achieve the 1st of his goals, which is to get himself home. But here in this wonderful plaque, he is disgusted as a beggar, and he is talking to his wife Penelope. But the old heroic code from the battle field is now brought into the hall at Ithica. Odysseus lines up allies. There is the noble swineherd Eumaeus. There is his own son, Telemachus, who has now come to a kind of maturity and one or two others. And they face off against the suitors. This is once again an instance of an absolute division between allies and opponents. The slaughter in the great hall, sorry, this is a little blurry but you get some sense of the suitors cowering behind the tables. The slaughter in the great hall is awful. No one is spared, not even the good suitor. The only ones who are spared are the bard, Phemius, and the herald. They're too precious to waste, they're too precious to kill. So, we have Odysseus home, he's gotten rid of the suitors.

26

Coursera

September 2, 2013

[THE ANCIENT GREEKS WEEK 1]

There still remains a reunion with Penelope that has to be accomplished. Recent scholarship has paid much more attention to the role of women in general in the ancient world. To women in the Odyssey, there are many, many more powerful female characters in the Odyssey, certainly than in the Iliad. We've seen one of them already, Circe, but Penelope is so to speak the center of these. She is in some ways the ideal Greek wife, faithful, an extraordinary weaver, a good manager of the household. But at the end of this poem, she also reveals that she is a master of trickery, a peer of her long-wandering husband. When she tricks him into identifying himself by saying that he has to move the bed. He says, you can't move the bed, I put that bed there. It's built into the trunk of an olive tree. And Penelope finally realizes that he is the only one who knows the secret other than herself. And Odysseus tells her his story. So, where are we? Again, at the end of a far too cursory introduction to this magnificent epic. But we can also think about a couple of larger issues. One, the Iliad is generally described as being similar to tragedy and the Odyssey to comedy. It's got a much broader range, of course geographically, much more extensive. And it's sort of atypical hero at the center of things. But we also have, and we will talk much more about this later on, the introduction of the gods. I want to make one point, and only one point only. The gods are powerful. They can take favorites, or have enemies among humans. But the only thing that really distinguishes the gods from us is that we die and they don't. The gods are not in any way morally exemplary. They're not meant to be looked up to, in that regard. The great historian, Herodotus, says that Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks their gods. We'll talk about Hesiod soon. But for now, you may want to think about the fact that human life, as depicted in the Homeric poems, is much more serious than divine life. The gods simply don't have any consequences for what they do. For humans, male and female, all of us, there are real consequences. And at the outset, at the sort of wellspring of Western literature, we are so lucky to have Homer with the two great epics. To give us some sense of how we put ourselves into the world.

27

Coursera