Professor Donald
Kagan: Our topic today is the Dark Ages and the world of
Homer, and of course,
you have as one of your reading assignments a problem that deals
precisely with that question that asks the subordinate
question: was there a real world that Homer's poems refer to?
If so, what world was it? Was it the world of the
Mycenaean Bronze Age? Was it the world that succeeded
that Bronze Age that we call the Dark Ages?
Was it the world in which tradition says Homer himself
lived, the transition first to the Archaic and then to the
Classical Period, the period in which we think
about the dawn of the polis?
That really is the question we are wrestling with and,
of course, behind it all is this idea: can we seek any
historical information from Homer's poems at all?
It would be a terrible blow to me and everybody else in the
field if the answer was "no," because just about everything
we have to say about this period between the Bronze Age and the
emergence of the polis--most of it
involves inferences from our understanding of what the
Homeric poems tell us. But I think we need to take
a hard look at what we can do, and I thought it would be
worthwhile reading a sentence from each of the introductory
paragraphs that we provide for you in the problem packet to
show you the range of opinion that is pretty representative of
what scholars think or have thought on the subject.
Moses Finley says, "If, then, the world of
Odysseus is to be placed in time as everything we know from the
comparative study of heroic poetry says it must,
the most likely centuries seem to be the tenth and the ninth,
that is to say what we call the Dark Ages."
Anthony Andrews says, "It may be that the epic
tradition had at some stage used as a model for the army before
Troy, an idealized version of some of
those bands of colonists who settled the coast of Asia Minor
in post-Mycenaean times." And if you look at the whole
story that he tells, that really means quite soon
after the fall of the Mycenaean world,
probably maybe a century earlier than what Finley
suggests. And then A.M.
Snodgrass says, "I offer this as a further
argument against the existence of a historical,
Homeric society." There isn't anything to be
found is what Snodgrass says. Ian Morris writes,
"The balance of probability seems to be in favor of a
consistent basis to the society of the poems derived from Greece
in the eight century B.C.," which would be at the end of
the period we've been talking about, the transition to the
world of the polis--Homer's own time
when he lived and wrote. And finally,
Barry Strauss says, "Ironically,
the more Homer exaggerates, the more authentic he is as a
representative of the Bronze Age."
So, what do we do? Well, all of these are learned
and clever men, but I don't think that they're
all equally right. But what I should also report
to you is that I think there is a widespread consensus among
most people that study the subject.
That doesn't mean that consensus is correct.
Not all of these opinions are shared by the same number,
by no means, of scholars.
Some of them are far out. I would say the one that says
you can't learn anything from this is an outlier.
The notion that this is about the Mycenaean world is an
outlier, and then I would say the largest consensus is
something like Finley's consensus,
but people verging in both directions from that.
What you'll hear from me is essentially that consensus point
of view. It strikes me as being better
supported than the others, but we really have to keep an
open mind because in this prehistoric period,
you have to be very modest about what you think you know
about it. Almost everything is inference
and judgment, and very little is anything
that you want to call proof. With those warnings,
let me tell you sort of what I think most people think about
this. First of all,
if we want to know about the Dark Ages, what sources do we
have available to us? And of course,
I've already mentioned the poems of Homer turn out to be a
very large source for what most people look to.
Secondly, there are legends that the Greeks told about their
early history, which come down to us in later
sources and they are available to us to use as sources.
A great question is, should we use them at all,
and if we do how carefully should we use them and so on?
This is a good time for me to make a confession,
so that you'll know how to judge what I say all through the
course. Well, prior to the late
eighteenth century when German scholars began to look at the
Homeric poems specifically, very, very carefully,
and then really very, very skeptically,
they made all sorts of suggestions that the poems we
have are really not to be thought of as the work of a
single poet, Homer, who had--wrote them both
out together. But who began to divide them up
into early and late elements, which I thought drove the field
of classics insane for about 100 years,
while folks argued about the unity of Homer,
the unity or not the unity of one of the poems and so on.
But it began a critical study of the poems for the first time
and critical methods were applied to history for the first
time ever, really, in the early nineteenth
century and thereafter. And it became common to reject
any ancient story that wasn't really nailed down very,
very firmly by some device. To take a skeptical
view--and a very interesting example of how things changed,
if you look at people, say an Englishman writing about
Ancient Greece in the late eighteenth century,
they tell the story of the early days based upon the
legends as though the legends were reliable information to
some degree. When you get to say the middle
of the nineteenth century and the work of the great English
historian of Ancient Greece, George Grote,
he begins his story in 776 with the Olympic Games.
He does tell you all about the legends first,
but he puts them aside and says they're just legends--now let's
talk history, and he doesn't begin that until
the eight century B.C. And so there is this critical
school that says, "I won't believe anything
unless it is proven to me." At the other extreme,
there's me, the most gullible historian imaginable.
My principle is this. I believe anything written in
ancient Latin or Greek unless I can't.
Now, things that prevent me from believing what I read are
that they are internally contradictory,
or what they say is impossible, or different ones contradict
each other and they can't both be right.
So, in those cases I abandon the ancient evidence.
Otherwise, you've got to convince me that they're not
true. Now, you might think of
this as, indeed, gullible.
A former colleague of mine put the thing very,
very well. He spoke about,
and I like to claim this approach, the position of
scholarship to which we call the higher naiveté. The way this works is,
you start out, you don't know anything,
and you're naïve. You believe everything.
Next, you get a college education and you don't believe
anything, and then you reach the level of wisdom,
the higher naiveté, and you know what to believe
even though you can't prove it. Okay, be warned;
I'm a practitioner of the higher naiveté.
So, I think the way to deal with legends is to regard them
as different from essentially sophisticated historical
statements, but as possibly deriving from
facts, which have obviously been distorted and misunderstood,
misused and so on. But it would be reckless,
it seems to me, to just put them aside and not
ask yourself the question, "Can there be something
believable at the roof of this?" And just to give you some
small defense of that approach, I always like to ask students,
"Suppose we didn't have a single historical record,
no newspaper, no diaries.
You know nothing totally reliable for what happened in
the latter part of the eighteenth century in America."
Would we know anything about what happened?
Of course, we would. We would know that there was a
revolution; it was against Great Britain.
I'm sure we would know that the French assisted in that.
I am certain we would know that George Washington was the
commander of our forces in our battle.
Those are easy. There's no getting around
reading those things, and then it gets to be more
interesting as we speculate. We would know as a fact that
George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock
River, except that it's impossible.
So, we would dismiss that one. We would be told that he was
very honest and told his father he chopped down a cherry tree,
which would be baloney, but we would be told that too.
But I think we would be told also very many true things,
which came down to us. So, the hard job would be to
select among these legendary things, to see what fact can be
found, and it will never be easy or deadly certain.
But that's what I'm talking about here.
Finally, there is the source that people
who are skeptical most like to believe because it's tangible.
I'm talking about archaeology, which is the discovery,
examination, and evaluation of material
evidence, which is not in writing,
the actual remains of places where they lived,
the implements that they used and so on,
and so on. And the beautiful thing about
that is you actually have it. It's objective.
It's an object. It's not something that
somebody imagined, but you shouldn't derive as
much confidence from it as a lot of archaeologists like to,
because it's only a thing until you say what it means,
until you put a date on it, until you try to understand
what it really is, what its function was,
who brought it there, who left it there.
All those things have to be reasoned out from all the
evidence, all the information you can get.
So there's an astonishing amount of speculation involved
in establishing this apparently rigorous objective technique.
We certainly need to use it and we need to use it as carefully,
that's my point, as we use everything else.
But it is indeed very valuable in studying a world before our
time, always. Now, we mentioned how
important the poems are. So, we need to take a look at
the question of what they are, and how we know about them,
and so on. I mentioned to you that the
Iliad and the Odyssey were known in the Western world
continuously from the time that they were made available.
So they were known and they were very important in the minds
of those people who knew about it,
but I also mentioned last time the impact of Schliemann's
excavations, which turned everything around.
The hyper-skeptical point of view taken by scholars in Europe
in the nineteenth century was eroded very sharply by the
discovery of places that really convinced pretty much everybody
that there was a Troy, and that there was a Mycenae.
And so the stories couldn't have been simple inventions,
and that began a new phase in the story.
And, again, to repeat what I said last time,
there were certain stunning physical resemblances between
what Homer said and what we could see.
The palaces were like the palaces that he described.
The world that they lived in was a world in which bronze was
used for implements, and weapons,
and such, not iron, and that squared with what was
found in Mycenae, what was found in the Mycenaean
world, namely bronze implements and fundamentally not iron ones.
Sometimes there were interesting little problems that
emerged and one of those has to do with the use of chariots in
warfare. Well, Homer has his heroes
using chariots and we know that chariots were used in warfare in
the Bronze Age around the Mediterranean Sea.
We have hard evidence of that in Egypt, in Asia Minor,
and in the Tigris Euphrates Valley.
So, you would say, well, that's another place
where Homer got it right, except for the fact that we
also know how chariots are used in warfare and the closest
analogy, I think, is to think of
chariots as tanks. You know, one famous tactic
is--if you have an infantry force coming forward,
you send tanks in it to break up the line of the infantry,
so that you can defeat the infantry in that way.
And apparently that is the way you use chariots in ancient
Bronze Age warfare. You would send the chariot
racing toward the line of infantrymen and the usual
outcome was the infantrymen would panic in the face of being
charged by these things, and you would break their line
and give the other side an opportunity to wreak havoc with
their army. Well, what do the Homeric
heroes do with their chariots? They use them as taxicabs. Achilles or Patroclus,
or whoever is on his chariot, is driving.
He is riding from the ships or wherever he is from the camp to
the battlefield. He might pick up a missile of
some kind, a spear typically, and fire it at somebody as he
goes by. This would be a drive by
killing, but then when he really gets to where the action is he
hops off--now we're going to have some fighting.
And so, the implication I think is that the memory of
chariot warfare back in the Mycenaean days lingered;
it was captured in the poetry that goes back--the bits of the
poetry that goes back to the Mycenaean period.
But how they were used was forgotten, and so the poets in
the subsequent years then thought,
"How would I use a chariot?"--never having seen a
chariot fight in a battle, and that's the outcome.
Finley, particularly, makes a lot of this as being
rather indicative of how he pictures the poems to work.
There are sort of legitimate memories, some of them going way
back to the Mycenaean period, but which may be misremembered
in some significant detail. And then, of course,
there's lots of stuff that doesn't have anything to do with
the Mycenaean period. His view is much,
if not most, of what we are told about the
Homeric world comes, as he says, in the tenth and in
the ninth centuries. One other thing that he
doesn't mention but I think is worth mentioning.
Many a scholar are very reluctant to admit that there's
any Mycenaean stuff here, although they cannot fail to
concede that some of the physical implements that are
found at Mycenaean sites are precisely like what Homer says.
But I think you can go a little bit beyond that.
Some scholars have pointed out that in Book II of the
Iliad in the section that we call,
"The Catalog of Ships," the poet lays out just exactly how
many warships came to Troy from Greece,
and just exactly how many came from each town.
And the names of the towns that are listed in that catalog of
ships, first of all, are all legitimate in the sense
every one of them we know did exist in the Mycenaean Period.
And perhaps no less significant is that there are also towns
listed there that are Mycenaean towns, which disappeared after
the Mycenaean Period. In other words,
they couldn't just have named towns that used to be Mycenaean,
but were still around, so that's why they knew them.
No, some towns had disappeared, but the names of those towns
show up in the catalog of ships. There's just no way to explain
that except to say that catalog of ships goes back to the
Mycenaean Period. Now, the differences
between what we find in the Homeric poems are also very
illuminating, differences between that and
what we know happened after the fall of the Mycenaean world.
For instance, one of the most striking things
that you find in cultures, anthropologists and
archaeologists live off this, is what they do with dead
bodies. Now, in Mycenae, it's obvious;
they bury them in the ground as most of us do.
The graves in the circle, the shaft graves,
and then the beehive tombs for the big shots,
and even outside in the countryside, we find graves
which have bones of people in them.
But we know that the Greeks in Homer don't do that.
The Greeks in Homer incinerate the bodies of the dead.
You remember the Iliad ends with the actual cremation
of the bodies of the relevant people.
So, that's a very significant difference.
That memory had simply died out and it helps us to remember too
that the tombs that we have seen now, they didn't see.
Whoever was writing the poems of Homer, whichever poets were
contributing to that over the ages after the Mycenaean Period,
they hadn't seen those Mycenaean sites.
They were buried. There are also differences,
sometimes, in the shape of weapons that we find in the
Greek World after the Mycenaean Period compared to what are
described in Homer's poems. I'm sorry.
Homer describes certain of these weapons,
which don't fit what we find in the ground.
And here's another critical element in the story. We know that the Mycenaeans,
or at least some small number of them could write,
because we have the Linear B script, which we can read.
There is no clue that there is such a thing as writing in the
Homeric poems. There's one very abstruse clue
where somebody seems to know something about it,
but fundamentally it's an illiterate society and that is a
major difference between the world of Homer and the Mycenaean
world. Some other differences:
Homer's kings, if you just see how they live,
what they do, what their wives do,
how they are treated by their fellow noblemen,
they are, in a relative sense,
very weak, very short on power and really quite poor compared
to these Mycenaean kings, the results of whose work and
lives we see at places like Mycenae.
Remember, I tried to emphasize how rich
you would have to be to undertake the building of the
temple, to undertake the construction
of one of those beehive tombs. You had to be very confident
because it was going to take a long time, a fantastic amount of
labor, a tremendous amount of money to do that.
There is no evidence in Homer that anybody had that kind of
wealth or that kind of power. What do the queens in Homer do
in their spare time? Or maybe it's not their spare
time, maybe it's their regular time.
Well, one of the things that they do when the Homeric heroes
refer to their wives--there are really only two places that they
seem to be associated with. One is the bedroom and the
other is the loom. What these ladies are doing is
weaving cloth. Now, that's not what queens do.
I'm sure the Mycenaean queens didn't do that,
but it's very, very interesting that that is
what the Homeric queens do. Well, how are we to explain the
discrepancies that are so great between these worlds?
And the answer that almost everybody now accepts without
argument is that these poems were created orally,
and passed on orally. That they were not written
down, so that what we have in the poems of Homer reflects
centuries of bards passing on bits of the poem,
or the poem in various versions, being always creative.
I mean, any bard, if by analogy we know about
bards in the modern world, we have some evidence on that.
Millman Parry, a Harvard scholar back in the
twenties, went to Yugoslavia to live in the mountains and the
backwoods, and he lived with people who
still had these bards around who created sort of epic narratives
of considerable length, but nothing resembling Homeric
length, I must say. Nothing that long,
but long enough in which they would tell the same stories in
verse and music, and you could recognize the
story as you went from bard to bard.
But every bard added and subtracted things to suit his
own talents. That's the idea of the game,
and then Parry demonstrated by careful scholarship of the
Homeric poems, that that is the way the
Homeric poems were. I want to use the word stitched
together, because in the Ancient Greek world the people who sang,
recited, created the poems of the Homeric epics were called
rhapsodes, and that means stitchers of
songs. So, what you have to imagine is
sometime back, I would argue,
in the Mycenaean Period, somebody began making up one of
these songs, telling the story of Greeks going to attack the
city of Troy. And that for centuries
thereafter, different rhapsodes repeated it but
elucidated it, illuminated it,
extended it, changed it, tried to improve
it, sometimes they added stuff. They were alive in the tenth
century. Some of them were alive in the
ninth and certainly some of them were alive in the time of Homer
in the eighth. So that what we have before us,
is that kind of product and that will explain both the
similarities and the differences,
and that is what underlies our interpretation of how the poems
got to be what they were. So, what is this world like
that emerges from the world of Homer?
We don't have to make up our minds in advance whether it was
a real world or a completely fantastic one,
but at least let's see if we can describe what world it looks
like. And I'm going to focus my
attention on what you might call the political side of that
society as it reveals itself in the poems.
We hear about key individuals, and the last time I mentioned
to you two words, I think I did,
but I'll mention them again this time.
The head of the expedition to Troy, Agamemnon,
the sort of generalissimo of that
expedition is called wanax.
When you drop the "w" as later Greek dialects did,
it becomes anax. He, so far as I know,
and I think I'm not forgetting, he is the only human being
referred to in the poems in that way.
There are, however, many an individual in the poem
who is referred to as a basileus,
the plural is basileis, which is normally and regularly
translated as king, and that's right.
For instance, in historical times when the
Greeks referred to the great King of Persia,
who was a real king and a powerful figure,
a king in every sense, the word they used for him was
basileus. But we quickly see that the
people referred to as basileus in Homer are not
like the great King of Persia. They are much lesser figures.
I'll come back to that in just a moment.
The Mycenaean kings we know, thanks to the Linear B
tablets, were referred to, the singular once again is
wanax, and the plural is
wanaktes. But in Homer the term is
reserved for Agamemnon or for gods, but not for any other
human being. And that raises the question,
why is Agamemnon wanax? And that, I think,
we have to understand as being because of his function in the
situation, namely there is a multi-city
invasion of Troy being carried on by these Mycenaean Greeks.
Agamemnon has been chosen as the generalissimo and
that is what gives him, temporarily,
the title of wanax. I would imagine and I'm very
confident that after the war of Troy, if Agamemnon had been
allowed by his wife to live for more than a few minutes after he
set foot at home, he would no longer be called
wanax, but would be called
basileus like the other rulers of their local towns.
You remember I suggested that in the Linear B tablets when
there was a reference to a basileus,
he's clearly well below the wanax and some scholars
suggest, in a persuasive way, I think, that these
basileus may have been village chieftains but that's as
high as they got. But it's very interesting that
when you get to historical Greece, as we shall see,
there are no wanaktes but there are,
at least according to tradition,
basileis. But no basileus has
anything like the clout that the Mycenaean kings did,
and of course we don't hear of any of them who have even the
temporary special power that Agamemnon has.
No human being is referred to as wanax in the period of
historical Greece. And of course,
the kings when we see them in Homer do not have a bureaucracy,
do not have scribes. How could there be scribes?
They didn't know how to write. There are no inventories.
These are not rich guys with fantastic quantities of stuff
that has to be cataloged and inventoried.
The kings, by our standards for kings, are really very poor.
What do they do in their spare time or in their time in
general? They, themselves,
engage in agriculture. I don't mean they dig in the
ground, but they supervise it; they think about it.
They are like people who are in charge of a plantation,
their own plantation, I mean.
So, that's one of their activities.
You cannot imagine the great kings of Mycenae doing that.
They would've had all kinds of subordinate officials taking
care of that. Another thing that these kings
are seen to do, which is in a way even at a
lower level, is to be herdsmen. Again, not themselves out there
with the goats and the sheep, but they are referred to as
having these herds and having to cope with them.
Another very popular, I would say the most popular
activity among the kings, was piracy.
That's what they brag about. Achilles, my God,
what a king he is! He sacked 24 cities.
Why do you sack a city? To steal what they have and,
well, there are all kinds of wonderful examples of people in
the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Some stranger comes, this is in the Odyssey,
and they ask him, "Sir, are you a pirate?"
And he says, "No, no, I'm not a pirate,"
just like they asked, I mean, "Do you come from
Chicago?" He wasn't insulted.
"No, I'm not a pirate, but I could've been,
of course. We understand that." And then later on in the story
that Homer tells in the Odyssey,
Odysseus himself is such a newcomer.
He's taken to the beautiful city on the island of Scheria,
Phaiacia, and is treated with great respect as you're supposed
to in the Mycenaean world. But after dinner,
they do what they do to amuse themselves.
They have athletic contests and they ask Odysseus to
participate. And he says,
"No, no, I'm too miserable and wretched," and the guy says,
"Oh, you must be some kind of a merchant."
And Odysseus says that that was a black remark.
Those are fighting words. You can't call--we know
Odysseus himself is a basileus--him a merchant.
Pirate, sure, but merchant, no. Another thing that is
interesting is that when you look at the burials of Greeks in
the post-Mycenaean period, in the Dark Ages,
there's nothing resembling those grand tombs and the wealth
that's buried in them for the dead.
You find that the tombs of noblemen are very much the same
one as the other. You're struck by the equality
from the standpoint of riches of the dead nobility.
No great distinction and no great riches either.
You're dealing with a poorer world and a world that doesn't
have this kind of outstanding monarchy.
So, one of the things I think we learn is that the Homeric
world of the kings, the role of the kings,
the wealth of the kings, the power of the kings,
the place of the kings is not taken from the Mycenaean period.
If it's describing anything that's real, it's describing
very clearly a post-Mycenaean world in those Dark Ages that we
have been talking about. But another thing that
crops up is that in the Iliad and the
Odyssey, you get a very clear picture,
really of what is the political structure of each society.
And by the way, you must keep in mind a very
important difference between the Iliad and the
Odyssey; the Iliad takes place at
Troy. None of these noblemen,
none of these kings, none of these heroes is back
home in his own town ruling it. He is at war and he is serving
under a commander, and so the behavior of these
people towards one another is not precisely like what it would
be. And here you see in the
Odyssey is what it would likely be, and the place where
you see it is back in Ithaca when Odysseus is there or when
we're taken to see what's going on.
I think that's a very important distinction to make,
but even when they're at Troy and in this sort of non-typical
situation, we still see the same
institutions working, the same relationships being
present as would be present at home,
although you have to watch out for the difference.
What do I mean? How are decisions made?
Does the king simply say, "Do it," and it gets done?
Nothing like that. The king has got important
powers. Agamemnon as the chief out
there in the Iliad, he can call a meeting of the
assembly, I should say of the council,
but he's not the only one who can.
Any nobleman who wants to can say, "We ought to have a
council," and then that council will come together and do
whatever business they wish to do.
The council, however, is limited to
noblemen, to these basileis.
Ordinary soldiers do not attend, and that's one of the
things I think we must grasp immediately.
The key line in the society of the Dark Ages appears to be
certainly not between monarchy and everybody else,
but between nobility and commoners.
That's the really important, serious line--certainly
politically and in other ways as well.
There is, however, in Homer, an assembly that
consists of the men, in the case of Troy of course
the fighting men who are there, but who are not basileus.
But also in the home, at home, the men of fighting
age and condition. They are the only ones who
matter. Of course, as in all of the
rest of Greek history, women are excluded from the
political realm, and of course,
well, I'll just leave it at that.
But so, too, there's obviously an age limit.
You have to be of an age to be a fighting man.
It's not necessarily defined for us.
It depends, could have been 18, could have been 20.
In Athens, in classical times it was 20. Well, let me just remind
you of some events that show you how these things work.
Remember, the Iliad starts because of a quarrel and
the quarrel emerges from the fact that the Greeks are busily
being killed by a terrible plague that has struck them.
They say, "We got to find out what's happening?"
They always assume that if something like that happened,
it was some god or gods who was angry with them.
So, they get a seer who goes and is persuaded to try to find
out what's happening. And he finally does ascertain
that Apollo is angry with the Greeks because Agamemnon took a
maiden from her father, and that father was a priest of
Apollo. And so when this is
ascertained, Achilles, the biggest,
bravest, strongest, fastest hero on the Greek side,
intervenes and says, "Well, look,
why don't you give back the girl and then Apollo will stop
killing us and everything will be okay?"
Agamemnon gets furious with Achilles and he says,
"No, I'm not giving back my girl.
I'm the boss here," as Edward G.
Robinson used to say. How many of you ever heard of
Edward G. Robinson?
Just raise your hand, please. Good, put me in my place.
It gets worse every year for me. And Achilles then speaks up
and really lets him have it, chews him out,
tells him what a bozo he is, and, you know,
the very important thing is this.
How can you do that if this is a king?
And the answer is: you can do that because you're
both kings. There is nothing out of line in
the sense of violating some kind of a real rule of the society,
but it's not typical, and especially since Agamemnon
has this position as the boss, the most kingly of the kings.
That's a word that Homer uses of him, basileutatos,
the most kingly, and that's because of his
position. So, Achilles is not doing
anything sort of illegal or unconstitutional,
but he's doing something that's really out of line from a normal
point of view. And finally Agamemnon says,
"No, I'm not going to give back my girl, but I'll tell you what, I will give back my girl if I
am given the girl you took from a different Trojan,
and that'll be fine. I'll have your girl and you
won't have any." So now, Achilles really blows
his top and from the quarrel, and finally when he says,
"Okay, if that's what you're going to do to me,
I'm taking my armor and I'm going home."
And off he goes, and he sulks in his tent for
the next nine books, and this turns out to be a
serious problem for them. But, what you learn from
that is that the way decisions are made, important decisions
are made, even in this army,
is by discussion among the basileis,
among the noblemen, and you will try to reach a
consensus about these things, and in an extreme odd situation
like this, it would have to be that they
would have to do what the commander says.
And probably back home there would be the implication that if
you can't work things out among them with consensus,
probably the king has some weight.
But what we have to remember is he can't give orders to anybody
typically, although Agamemnon can get away with it on this
expedition. Well, that's one story.
Another story that we're told is that soon afterwards
also in that same place in the Iliad,
a dream comes to Agamemnon, because, you know,
this is their tenth year. They've been trying to take
this city for nine years. It's almost as bad as Iraq and
the soldiers are tired of all of this.
If we can't take the city, we ought to go home and there's
a lot of spirit that says we ought to go home.
And so a dream comes to Agamemnon.
The god says to him, "Here's what you need to do.
You need to try the spirit of your men, and in that way to
inspirit them to carry on until victory.
So, what you should do is to get up and speak to your
soldiers, and say that you're never going to take Troy.
You might as well pack up and go home, and then they'll say,
'No, king, no, we receive to do that.
We insist on staying. We're going to re-up and do
another term, and we're going to take the
city.'" So, Agamemnon says,
"Great, I'll do that," and he calls the troops together to
battle, and he makes his little speech.
I wish I could reproduce the Homer.
I didn't take it along with me, but the essence of it is a
great roar and rumble emerged as the troops turned and began
racing back to the ships to get the hell out of there.
Just to carry on some of the highlights,
that tells us a lot about the society.
So, as they're roaring back, suddenly Odysseus,
the slyest, the cleverest, the smartest of all of the
Greeks, he goes racing among the troops
who are heading back and he grabs one, and Homer says when
he came to a gentleman, a basileus,
he would say, "Sir, you are making a mistake.
You don't understand the game that Agamemnon is playing," and
he explains it to him, and the guy says,
"Oh, okay." When he comes to one of the
common sort, he says, "You bloody imbecile,
get the hell back to where you belong."
That's a rough translation and everybody finally grabs enough
of them and the thing turns around, everybody goes back and
sits down. And up steps one man. Homer describes him as the
ugliest man in the entire army. So you get a clue as to what
we're supposed to think about him, and he makes a speech which
denounces all of the basileus,
Agamemnon ahead of any of them. He says, "We ordinary soldiers
have had enough and we would like to go home."
And up steps Odysseus and blasts him with his scepter,
smashes him across the back, leaving a welt that could be
seen by the entire army, and tears came to the eyes of
this guy. Are we supposed to feel
sorry for him? Well, the next lines in Homer
say that one soldier popped up and said, "Of all the great
things Odysseus has done for us here,
that was the greatest, to shut up a big mouth idiot
like Thersites." Well, what Thersites had done
that was wrong, of course the poet and Odysseus
didn't like his policy suggestion, but he had no right
to speak at all. The only people who could speak
in the council or in an assembly were the noblemen,
the basileis. So, he had crossed the line as
an ordinary soldier. To rise and to say anything was
a violation of the culture, and that's one of the places
where you see where this sharp line exists.
They just take orders, but the gentlemen don't just
take orders. They can argue and sometimes
they can win the argument. So, what you see in this very
brief and inadequate account that I've given you is that we
really, in spite of the fact that we
have basileis, and even in this case an
anax, we really don't have a proper
monarchical tradition. When we think of monarchs,
single rulers, we think of Hammurabi and we
think of the kings of Persia, and we think of Louis XIV.
We do not think of what we have here, which is a bunch of
noblemen who are essentially equal,
and the differences between them don't come from birth or
rank as between them, but from wealth and power that
they happen to possess. It is, rather,
not a royal society but an aristocratic society.
I think that's the main message and it is the matrix of all
future political ideas and arguments in the Greek world
that comes after this time. I think you need to understand
that what the Greeks in the historical period--once we start
having written records by the Greeks themselves,
the thing that is the standard position--what is this thing on
the computer when you fall back to a position?
What do you call that position? What is it?
Default, that's right. Good, the default position in
Greek political theory is aristocracy;
that is the normal thing. A very good example of that is
what I've been telling you; that's really what happens.
And here's another thing, if you go to the end of the
Greek story, when you think about political theory,
there's Plato, and when he lays out the ideal
society in his view, in the Republic,
we find there are multiple rulers.
And these, of course, turn out to be the winners of
the Jeopardy contest playoffs. But it doesn't matter.
There's never one king. It's always a group of people
that is the best government, and they will be the best.
In this case defined chiefly by their intelligence,
but other things too. Well, anyway in this case,
in Greek political thinking the aristocracy of birth is the
default position. Anybody who wants to argue for
a different kind of political arrangement will have to make
the case uphill against all tradition.
I hope that you'll have that in the back of your head when we
get to the story of Athens and the invention of democracy,
because it was off the wall from the perspective of Greek
tradition. And of course,
anybody from time to time, there are individuals who
thought that monarchy might be a fine thing.
They ran against something that was regarded with much more
hostility by the Greeks. When they're through and had
reached their peak, their notion of monarchy is
something fit for barbarians, but not for Greeks.
A free man may not live under a monarchy, and the roots of that,
I think, are visible in Homer. In passing, I just want to say
that Homer, of course, is the basic text,
the basic document for all Greek thinking in every area
that you can imagine throughout the rest of Greek history.
Over time, it becomes not the only one, but it never ceases to
be the best known, the most influential,
and the most powerful. If it were a religious document
primarily we would speak of it as the Greek Bible,
but it isn't. Well, some examples,
later on in history there's a quarrel between Athens and
Megara as to who controls the island of Salamis.
They decide to call in an arbitrator.
So, they call in the Spartans, and the Spartans say,
"Okay, we'll decide," and they decide that it belongs to
Athens. Why?
Well, if you look at the catalog of ships in Homer's
Iliad, the island of Salamis had its
ships lined up next to the island of Athens.
Ballgame. You have to realize how potent
this is. Well, let me turn to
another aspect of the story of Homer and how the poems play
into Greek society. I want to talk to you about the
ethics and values that emerge from the reading of the
Iliad and the Odyssey. I mentioned
religion and so we should take a look first at the gods.
We are talking, first of all,
and remember about a multi-deity society.
Polytheism is what we're talking about.
That is true of all of human societies that we know anything
about down to the earliest possible exception,
I suppose; well, it depends what you think
is earliest. You could say the Hebrews are
the earliest, pure and simple,
but depending on how you date biblical things,
there's an outside chance that an Egyptian pharaoh in the
sixteenth century B.C., I think, might have claim to
have some such state. But otherwise,
there is no such thing. So, this is a polytheistic
society with heroic characteristics.
That is, this kind of aristocratic outfit,
aristocracy of birth, which is legitimized by heroic
behavior on the battlefield. Now, one of the things the
Greeks believed, as we discover from a poem
written by one of their major poets,
is something so far as I know unique to the Greeks.
They claimed that they were of the same race as the gods,
and I really don't know of anybody else who made that
claim. And so you will hear Homeric
characters referred to by epithets, Homer,
part of the technique of passing on oral poetry is by
having epithets attached to the rulers to help with the meter.
Some hero will be called dios, meaning godly,
god-like, diotrephes, reared as a god,
isothesos, equal unto a god,
and there are others as well. Now, mind you,
notice these are not people referred to as god-fearing or
lovers of god, no.
They are just about equal to the gods according to these
terms. Now, that on the one hand is
this extraordinary claim that the Greeks make.
They did make amazingly powerful claims for human beings
as opposed to divinity, compared to any society that I
know anything about. This is part of the arrogance
that is characteristic of the Ancient Greeks,
but at the same time, and right away at the beginning
we're getting to such a very Greek thing, a Greek
characteristic. At the same time that he is
this great thing almost like a god, he is also not a god in the
most crucial way possible. Gods do not die.
Men die. The mortality of the human
being is a reality and it's of the greatest significance and
importance, and of course men are not as
strong and as powerful as the gods.
And indeed, as we shall see, well, the tragic view of life,
which the Greeks invent and which characterizes their
culture, is there right at the beginning
in the Iliad and the Odyssey. It says that at the
same time as man is a remarkable,
marvelous creature capable of all sorts of amazing things,
even unto being almost like the gods,
he is nonetheless mortal and dies, and he doesn't have the
power that the gods do. And what do you do about
that? Well, it's interesting,
I think, to compare the Greek way of dealing with this human
problem that we all have, the problem of death.
How do we deal with the fact that we will die?
Well, there's what I like to call the Eastern solution that
you find in many an Eastern religion and philosophy that
says that man is, in fact, nothing.
He is dust. He is dung depending on which
story you listen to. So, of course you're going to
die. Who cares?
Why should you care? You were nothing to begin with;
you'll be nothing when you're finished.
Relax. Then there is what I would
characterize as the Christian solution.
You're worried about dying? You need not die.
If you are a good Christian and you do all the things that you
need to do to be a good Christian, you will not die.
You will have personal immortality.
So that's how you get around that problem.
No need to worry if you're doing things right.
Well, somehow Christians continued to worry and we have a
millennium of them killing each other about how you're supposed
to worry about these things. But if you can accept the
purity of the statement I just made, it is at the root of the
thing you have a solution. But the Greek tragic view
does not take either of these routes, which I regard as a
relatively easy escape from the problem compared to the way the
Greeks got stuck. Man is great and they keep
saying so. He is important.
He is capable of great things. He is of the same race as the
gods, and at the same time his life is short and death is
final, and death is bad. I ought to say a word about
death, in order to comprehend what the Greeks thought.
You know, different peoples have had different ideas about
them. Sometimes the notion is that it
is just terrible for everybody with actual pain and suffering,
and others have a notion of a wonderful kind of a heaven in
which marvelous things happen to you,
sometimes spiritual, sometimes physical depending on
the religion. But for the Greeks,
as I think for quite a few other people in the ancient
world, death was nothing in the worst sense of the word.
You just went somewhere and there was nothing.
There was darkness. There was nothing at all.
Some few people who had sinned terribly and earned the
wrath of the gods would, indeed, be tortured in some
special and typically Greek, interesting way.
You remember Tantalus. He had done a terrible thing
and there he stood forever with his feet in the water below,
and above him a tree with grapes hanging down,
and dying of thirst. And every time he went down to
try to sip some of the water, the water receded,
and anytime he reached up for the grapes, the grapes were
pulled back. That is a Greek idea of hell,
where you got to keep trying and you always lose.
So, that's the picture and you have to realize that death is a
bad thing. In the Odyssey,
Odysseus has reason to go down to Hades, and while he's down
there he comes upon Achilles who has died.
And he says, "Well, it's good to see you,
Achilles. Say, you look fine.
You must really be doing okay down here.
I know that you are a judge down here and much respected.
So, looks like you've beaten the rap."
And Achilles says, "Odysseus, don't say a word to
me about the virtues of death. Better to be a serf,
the lowest serf on the earth, than to be a king in Hades."
Now, that's as bad as it can possibly be.
The great Achilles, respected still in the
afterworld would immediately turn it in to be a complete
nobody on earth. So, it's very important.
They faced without any real retreat the reality and the
negative character of death, even as they refused to reject
the significance of life or of mankind.
That is what I mean when I speak of the tragic view,
and it's very important. Now, it seems to me we can
eliminate that a little bit by comparing it with various modern
approaches to the same sorts of problems.
We haven't gotten rid of those problems yet,
in spite of modern medicine. We live, still,
I think in what might be called the Age of the Enlightenment.
That is the dominant sort of paradigm of what life is all
about, at least in the Western world and a good deal more of it
where the West has had an influence.
At the core of it is a belief in progress, something that was
essentially not present among the Greeks. Progress in the eyes of the
philosophers of the eighteenth century, though they would have
been very angry to hear me say this,
was something like the equivalent of the Christian hope
for immortality. The hope of the Voltaires of
this world was that they could make the world better constantly
by their efforts, and this would be rewarded in a
kind of a way, because progress in the future
after they were gone would redound to their credit for
having brought it about. And that in some sense they
would live on in this society which they had improved and made
a better thing. Another aspect that is very
important in this sort of enlightenment approach is
individualism, that the core of everything is
the single individual person. As we shall see,
this is very different from the Greeks.
Now, the Greeks were very much concerned individuals and this
is especially true of the democrats in Athens.
But even their most potent spokesman and leader placed the
goals, and achievements, and everything else of an
individual behind something that they thought was more important,
which was the community at large, which,
in historical times was the polis.
Well, that's not the way it is with the modern world and that's
not the way it comes out of the enlightenment,
the individual is the ultimate. The enlightenment,
if you go back to its routes in the seventeenth century with the
likes of Hobbes and Locke--what is the ultimate place you go to?
It is the rights of individuals. You may not stamp out the
rights of individuals. They are inherent in everything.
Either you believe, as our founding father said
that we were endowed with them by our creator.
They didn't say God because, of course, the Enlightenment
thinkers were not so sure they believed in God,
but they still seemed to believe in something they wanted
to call a creator. Or if you didn't believe in
God, this was just a natural right.
Nature gave each individual the right to life,
liberty, property, and nobody could take these
away legitimately. Well, the Greeks had no
concept of natural rights, or of rights that human beings
were given by the gods. That is a very important
difference that was, you had to act in such a way as
to make life possible and decent,
and for the Greeks that always meant being part of a decent
community, the polis. But the modern world,
to get back to that, to this Enlightenment world,
individualism and a key aspect to that is hedonism.
That is to say, it is legitimate and proper to
search for pleasure, for each individual to attempt
to please himself however he can.
And it turns out that if you could take it to our own day,
there are no limits pretty much to what he can do to gain
pleasure. I would argue that there is a
direct line from the Enlightenment philosophy to
nihilism, that is to say a philosophy
that says there are no limits to what human beings may do.
What turns out to be the practical fact is that he who
has the power and the will to do what he wants will be able to do
so, and he who has not will be
forced to suffer whatever the powerful impose on him.
And this is seen by the original nihilists as a good
thing. What's his name,
Nietzsche, of course, said, "Some of us are better
than others. Some of us are supermen,
and it is quite wrong and wicked for us to be treated as
though we were ordinary fellows, and therefore do not tie us
down with these ridiculous codes of ethics, and morals,
and other things which are simply the weapons by which the
weak hold down the strong." This was an interesting idea,
but it wasn't new. There's a Greek in the fifth
century who says the same thing. There is no definition of
goodness for this modern approach, no definition of
happiness. Each individual decides for
himself what is good, what is happy.
What it really does is to evade the question that I'm talking
about. Is this all okay?
If we're all going to die then does it really mean that we
should just do the best we can at anybody's expense while we're
alive? Is that a satisfactory outcome?
Will we indeed be happier, better off while we're alive?
If we do that, the Greeks would have said,
"That is stupid and absurd to think for ten seconds you'll
realize that's no good." Now, the Greeks on the
other hand had a powerful belief in the dominance of chance.
They accepted, again, what is a very modern
idea now, that in fact there is no divine force or divine forces
who oversee what happens to mankind on earth.
But, rather, things happen simply in a
random way according to no particular rule and that's the
way it is. It is not virtue or merit that
determine the quality of your life.
It is chance, and there are several places in
the Iliad and the Odyssey that emphasize that
point. Well, that leaves the
Greeks with something like this question.
In the light of human mortality, the disinterest of
the gods, the chanciness of life, what can man do to achieve
happiness and immortality? Because he still doesn't feel
happy about his mortality. Though he accepts that this is
a problem, it's something that he still hankers after.
It's inevitable that people should, and part of the answer
is very Homeric. It is the heroic ethic.
At a certain place, I think a couple of places in
the Iliad, Achilles answers the question,
"Why did you come here to fight at Troy?"
We know the legend says that Achilles was told before he came
that if he did not go to Troy and fight in that war,
because his mother was a goddess, he had partial divinity
in him, he would be immortal. He would never die.
But, on the other hand, he would not be great and
famous. His memory would not be carried
forward into the future. If he went to Troy,
he would die, but his memory as the greatest
of the Achaeans would be immortal forever.
Well, you know the choice he took and you know that it turned
out to be right. We still know about Achilles,
don't we? And when we're all gone,
people will know about Achilles.
So, we should take the Greeks very seriously on that score.
Well, anyway, sometimes he's asked,
"What made you come here in spite of that?"
and his answer was, "Well, when my father sent me
here, he told me a number of things that I'm supposed to do,
but the most important of these was the Greek words,
aien aristeioi, always be the Best.
The best doesn't mean morally the best in anything like our
sense. It means the greatest,
the strongest, the ablest, the most admired.
That is what you want to be. Well, you can only do that if
you are in a contest. You can only be the best if
somebody is not as good, and the Greek word for that
kind of a contest is agon,
and so it's fair to think about the Greeks, I think it's very
necessary to think about the Greeks as having a particular
agonal society, a society filled with
competition, in which if not everybody, lots and lots of
people are constantly striving to be the very best,
whatever the definition of best is in the context that's
relevant. Now, I guess I'm out of time.
So, I'll pick up the story next time with the story about this
heroic ethic and the impact that it has on Greek society.
