Professor Donald
Kagan: Last time I was talking to you about the world
of Homer from the side of, you might say,
the life of the mind rather than the practical matters of
society by talking about values and ethics in the world of
Homer. I also spoke to you about the
heroic ethic, which is the dominant element
in this system of theirs. Another way of looking at it is
that it is an aristocratic way of thinking and feeling.
At the core of it, is the concept of
arête. Now, that's a word that causes
us some problems because it comes to mean even in antiquity
something quite different, and especially if you're
talking about Christianity which adopts the word as well,
where it comes to mean goodness, goodness in a kind of
a Christian sense. Well, erase all of those ideas
from your head when you think about the world of Homer,
and I would say, the world of Greece in the
period we're studying. Arête derives from
the Greek word anar, which means man;
man as opposed to woman. These are the masculine
qualities as the Greeks saw them and primarily among them was the
idea of courage: physical courage,
moral courage, mental courage,
manly courage in battle is the most core aspect of this word,
an idea which comes to spread and to be much more encompassing
than that. I guess the most neutral way to
translate the word is excellence, prowess,
the ability to do something or to be something,
which is admired in the fullest way possible.
Some of the desired quality, some of the examples of
arête are courage as I've said,
but also beauty, strength, the ability to
perform athletics very well, but also to speak very well.
And it is an extraordinary thing I think for modern people
to see that there are two central heroes in the poems of
Homer-Achilles the great central figure of the Iliad who
represents physical courage, strength, power,
beauty, speed, all of those things,
and Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey,
but present and very important in both poems.
He has also got all of these things, but the thing that sets
him apart, that makes him the special kind of hero he is,
is his skill in speech which doesn't mean only that he
pronounces words very well, or that he selects them very
well for beautifully or something.
But rather that he is enormously clever,
that he can use speech to achieve practical ends just as
he uses strength and power, and all those other things.
The Greeks, in Homer's world, seem to regard one just about
as well as they do the other. Odysseus is the man,
the wily Odysseus as Homer calls him, the man of many
devices, all of those things are great
and they are equally honored along with the physical courage
that is so characteristic of these guys. The recognition of those
qualities, the recognition of the arête that
these heroes have is what their lives are all about.
First of all, they have to have these
qualities, but it's not enough. They must be recognized by the
people among whom they lived, by the communities in which
they live. The highest rewards the
individual can have is the recognition of their fellow men
for their very, very high qualities.
We are talking about a society, therefore, the anthropologists
have come up with, which I think is a useful
distinction. Societies, based on shame,
as opposed to those that practice guilt;
guilt is something very internal and personal.
Shame is something very external and public.
How you are treated and greeted is what makes your worth.
So, it is from the beginning a society in which the community
is a critical element, maybe the critical element,
an individual who didn't live in a society could not achieve
the kinds of glory and fame, and recognition that you expect
from a hero. All of these heroes are
aristocrats in the traditional sense of the word;
they arrive at their high standing in their community by
virtue of birth. You are born to be one of these
people because your father was such a person belonging to the
right families and so on. The noble families of Greece,
and we see it already in Homer, typically claim descent from
some god or other and ordinary people do not have that ability. The family and the individual
are the critical elements. A larger community,
meaning your entire village, your entire city,
your entire region, that is barely mentioned.
That is not talked about. Again, think about Achilles,
when he refuses to do what he's supposed -- to fight with the
Greeks because he's had a fight with Agamemnon,
nobody says, "Wait a minute that's treason,
you can't do that. You've been signed up by your
city or by this expedition to fight and you've got to fight."
Nobody says that. What they say is,
"Oh please, we need you Achilles, you must not do this."
But nobody says, "Arrest that man,
he has broken his debt; he's not performing his debt to
the community." Everybody knows that all those
heroes are there because they want to be and they want to be
there, so that they can earn both the
wealth that can be taken from a defeated city,
but even more important, the kind of fame and glory that
comes with such deeds. I've already told you the story
about Achilles having the choice of living forever without fame
or dying with fame, and he makes the choice for
death and fame. That, I think, is very critical.
That attitude, that point of view,
even after the world of Homer is gone, remains a very powerful
influence on the Greeks throughout the rest of their
history, so that you have built into
that society an inherent conflict.
After all, even these heroes need communities in which to
live for all the various purposes that human beings do.
So, you would think they have some allegiance to them.
They do, but they also have an allegiance to their families and
to themselves, which, in Homer,
tend to predominate, and yet there is a sense in
which the conflict is very real. If you look at the problem in
Homer, Achilles when he withdraws and refuses to fight
for the army, nobody can tell him to do
otherwise. He has a right to do that but
that means that something is wrong and it's very clear that
he has been overcome by rage and he is not behaving in the
sensible way--that even a Greek hero is supposed to and he has
not brought back to normal, to a position in which people
can say, yes, well, you're a great hero and
you're not out of your mind. Even Achilles gives up his
rage, and he allows--you remember he allows Priam to bury
his son Hector, something he would have refused
to do in his rage. So, even Achilles has got to
come to terms with the community norms, in order to be living in
a proper life, and this conflict between his
family and private desires and needs, and those of the
community will be characteristic very strongly of the Greek way
of life for the rest of its history,
not always in precisely the same form but it will be there.
Competition, again, is rearing its head.
It's another form of competition, the competition
between these two sources of values, the community at large
versus the individual and the family.
This kind of tension doesn't make things clear;
the rules are not absolute, and not everybody fits into a
pigeon hole. It is not easy to say,
what is the right thing, or what is the wrong thing.
All of that creates confusion, problems, but also,
conflict, tension, competition,
all those things create a degree of freedom which doesn't
permit the typical despotic kind of culture which characterizes
almost all of the human experiences that we know in the
early history of the human race. So, I want to turn now to
the way in which this way of thinking had an impact on the
future, and of course I'm speaking
about the future of Western civilization which was the heir
to this tradition. I mentioned to you already,
last time, that in a way the poems are a kind of a bible.
It is the source of all knowledge and wisdom that
anybody who knows anything knows,
and how they were used for practical purposes as when the
Spartans made a decision about who owned Salamis based on what
it said in the Iliad, but it's also important to
realize how those poems inspired the imagination of Greeks for
the rest of their history. Another fact is that we are
told that when Alexander the Great went out to conquer the
Persian Empire, and as far as he was concerned,
to conquer everything he could reach, he carried with him a
copy of the Iliad which it is alleged he put under his
pillow. This is a problem when you
consider that books in the days were not likely to be codices as
they are today, but scrolls that took up quite
a lot of space. I don't know quite how Alex
managed it but that's what they say, but the principle is
established. It was clear,
he was another Achilles in his own eyes, and it was for him to
achieve the great deeds that I have been mentioning.
Now, if you look at the story of Western civilization,
it provides a very interesting contrast within it and the,
I'm sorry, the Greek experience that I'm talking about now based
upon what you see in Homer, provides a contrast within a
competition to the other great tradition of Western
civilization, which is the Judeo-Christian
tradition. I just want to make a few small
points that indicate how that works.
The Iliad begins--the first word in the Iliad
is the accusative noun, mēnin,
wrath, anger. I am singing about the wrath,
the anger Achilles which brought so many men to their
doom, is what Homer says. The first thing is the emotion
of an individual man. The Odyssey begins even
more strikingly with the word andra,
the accusative of anēr,
the accusative case of a man, and he says,
sing to me goddess about that man,
that man of many devices, that clever man Odysseus.
The Aeneid of Virgil based, of course,
on the Iliad and the Odyssey,
begins arma virumque cano, I sing of arms and the
man, the man Aeneas. What are the Greeks talking
about? I'm talking about individual
men, extraordinary men and the events that emerge from them and
the life they lead. Well, look at our Bible.
It begins--this will be news to most of you;
in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth and
it. The book goes right on to talk
about God, what he does, sometimes why he does it,
what is the effect of what he does, but the center of our book
is God, not man. It's not just an accident that
this reveals the characteristic of each one of these cultures.
The Greeks had a humanistic outlook on life.
They believed in the gods, they were religious people,
but the core of their lives was shaped by human things in a way
different from what was true of the Hebrews and the Christians
later on, that is a Divine view.
The secular approach is very, very Greek versus a religious
approach. The Greek view,
moreover, presupposes that man lives in society.
He is not a creature off by himself.
By definition, he necessarily lives in
society. He is conceivable to the Greeks
only in a society. The Iliad,
which is about a war, immediately is a kind of an
artificial society put together for the purpose of defeating the
Trojans and taking their city. As I've suggested to you,
the values that are the most important are community values.
That is to say, the reward of good behavior is
the admiration and the honor that a hero gets,
and the most serious punishment he can suffer is to be shamed in
front of that community. Aristotle, writing late in the
Greek tradition, but still powerfully influenced
by these kinds of ideas, speaks about man as a--the
Greek words are a politicon zoon, and I think the best
way to understand it is to think of it as meaning,
man is a creature who lives in a polis,
in a city state, in a Greek kind of a city
state. In the same general passage he
says, a man who is by nature without a polis is either
more or less than a man. What he means by that is,
if a man is superior to the polis doesn't need a
polis, he is a god because men need a
polis. If he is beneath the
polis it means he's beneath what it is to a human
being, and that tells you just how
potent is this concept of a community for the Greeks and it
emerges in its own way from the Iliad in the
Odyssey. Odysseus also was offered
an opportunity to live forever. When he was shipwrecked on the
island in which the goddess Calypso ruled,
she fell in love with Odysseus, just as the fate of great
heroes--they are heroic and handsome, and fast and women
love them. She says, just stay with me and
I--you will live forever and all will be well and he says,
well, you're a very beautiful girl and I enjoy you a lot,
but I got to go back to Ithaca. Now, why does he have to go
back to Ithaca? Well, he has a wife whom he
loves, Penelope, and he has a son whom he has
barely seen because he had to go off to Troy almost 20 years ago
to fight that battle and he hasn't been home since.
Those are very powerful pulls that we easily do understand,
but it's also true that he is the king in Ithaca,
and when he returns to Ithaca he immediately moves into a
position of honor and respect, which is a critical part of his
own sense of himself, of what he needs to be what he
wants to be. We don't have in American
society an Iliad, an Odyssey,
we don't have our own bible, but I think Mark Twain's Huck
Finn is really very, very revealing to see what is
so different about us in the modern times from the Homeric
world. When things don't go right for
Huck, what does he do? He lights out and wants to get
away from society, he wants to go wandering and
exploring, as an individual rejecting
society, fleeing for his individualism,
and that tradition, as you all know--how many
examples can we think of works that really project the
greatness of being all by yourself and away from people,
and away from society. That's where good things are.
The Greeks would have thought you were out of your mind,
or that you were some kind of barbarian, but that's okay.
People who have never known of civil society;
people who have never known of a world with polis,
well, of course, they would do something stupid
like that. I think that's an interesting
contrast. Now, let me carry on with
this by talking about the views of society which are
characteristic of the two traditions in Western
civilization. What do we see in the Bible?
When God decides to invent man, he places him in the Garden of
Eden. The Garden of Eden contains,
first of all, just Adam and then when God
decides, for his own reasons,
that he needs a companion, he invents one other companion,
Eve. Where they live is paradise.
One man, one woman, that's all you need,
it's great. Nothing could ever be so good.
Well, what happens? They transgress. Eve persuaded by the serpent,
persuades Adam to do what was forbidden by God.
What is forbidden by God? It is to eat the fruit of the
tree of knowledge because if human beings obtain knowledge,
they will be like the gods, and that is unacceptable.
So when you do that, you have to be punished.
What is punishment? To be thrown out of Eden,
to be thrown out of this isolated condition of
perfection. What is perfection?
You don't have to work, you can eat without doing
anything about it, you don't seem to do much of
anything, which is fine. Everything is quiet,
peaceful, no problems, no action, that's paradise.
A Greek would go crazy at the thought.
It is a pre-social, a pre-political life.
Life in society what Adam and Eve have to encounter now.
They now have to form villages, cities, start living among each
other, and so on. That is the punishment for the
sin of seeking knowledge of good and evil and therefore of
straining for divinity. Man, the message I think is,
must know his place, which is humble and not close
to divine. His hope rests simply with God
not with himself. When he tries to take the
things into his own hands, and in the process,
to contravene the will of God, only terrible things can happen
to him. It's very interesting,
I think, that in the eighteenth century, Rousseau,
who himself seems to me to have been a kind of like a poisoned
apple in the history of the human race oddly,
revives that biblical view, if you think about it.
His view is man was happy and good before the invention of
society, which society corrupts man and takes away from him his
happiness. What we need to do is undue the
evils that organized society have done, and if only we remove
all of the bad things created by society,
man would return to his naturally perfect virtuous self,
which is of course, a major source of individualism
which is this great Western force, and the nihilism that I
think inevitably emerges from it.
I think people have, in different ways,
found in Russo, the root both of a Nietzschean
nihilism and of Marx, and I think there is powerful
reason to do so, because you can go in either
one of those directions once you start making this kind of
assumption. For the Greeks,
on the other hand as I've said, political society was essential
for living any kind of a good life.
In the Odyssey, you remember Odysseus finds
himself on the island of the Cyclops,
those one-eyed monsters, and what is it about them that
make them so monstrous, so inhuman from the perspective
of the Homeric heroes? Here's the line that Homer
writes, they live without--the Greek word is nomoi,
which we would translate as laws, but before they become
laws they are the customary norms of society,
in other words, civilization. They live without nomoi
and they wreck not of one another, that is to say,
each family lives by itself. They have nothing to do with
each other, they do not have a community, and they do not have
a society. So, they are,
of course, sort of prehistoric monsters as far as the Greeks
are concerned. Now, the Judeo-Christian
story, as I think of it--by the way, the word "story" is a
translation or it means the same thing the Greek word
muthos, our word, myth.
A myth, in this sense, according to the Greeks,
is just a tale. It can true,
it can be false, and so on.
Anyway, the Judeo-Christian story says, in the beginning,
men were innocent. Innocent was the same as
ignorant because knowledge gets in the way of their innocence
and they have solitude, living in paradise.
What destroys their happy, permanent condition is the sin
of pride and the consequence of that sin is society,
corruption, pain, and death because they knew
neither pain nor death while they were in Eden.
Salvation is available, and with it immortality,
but it comes from God and it doesn't come in the world in
which we live, but in some other world to be
achieved in the future. That, I think,
is a very thumbnail sketch of the Judeo-Christian story.
The Greek story is quite different.
War is right at the center of it, and war itself requires
political and social organization.
There can be fighting without war but there can be no war
without an organization that makes it something more than
just plain fighting. It requires political and
social organization. The search for honor and glory
are at the root of why men fight and why they do many,
many other things in their lives, according to this view.
The Greeks did have a notion that in a way resembles some of
the things I've said about the Judeo-Christian story.
They had a concept called hybris,
to be translated as something among these terms,
excess, arrogance, violence.
I think the fullest grasp of it, I think, might be rendered
best by violent arrogance. Some notion of being above
yourself and thinking yourself more than a man with the
implication that you are approaching some kind of
divinity by being more than a man,
and acting accordingly, which usually requires that you
use violence to achieve what you want.
The sort of the standard picture in Greek ethics runs
this way. A man is granted too much,
he is too well off, he is too rich,
he is too strong, he is too beautiful,
so much so that he becomes too arrogant and is ready to step
beyond his human condition. At that point,
the gods don't like it because like the Judeo-Christian god,
they want to have some boundary between the two,
but for them it's very important, because the boundary
is far from clear. So what happens to the man who
has too much? He is afflicted with
hybris, which leads him to take the
violent action. Onto the scene then comes the
goddess Ate, which might be translated moral
blindness. In other words,
he no longer can think straight and so he will do something
dangerous, harmful, and very ultimately
bad for himself, and when he does whatever it
is, he is struck by Nemesis,
the goddess of retribution. Well, of course,
the most famous Greek case, I think of these things,
is in Sophocles' play Oedipus the King,
which illustrates it perfectly well.
Oedipus is a brilliant man; he achieves the kingship of his
city because of his extraordinary intelligence,
and he's a very good man. He is king, don't imagine that
he's a despot, anything but;
the people love him. He saved the city thanks to his
brilliance and his goodwill. However, after a while,
he comes to be too satisfied, too comfortable with his own
brilliance and when another threat comes to the city,
he is confident that he can solve the problem again for his
people. He is warned by the gods
through seers, and by men of wisdom saying,
don't investigate this question too far;
you might be making a mistake. He won't listen;
he bowls ahead, and he discovers in the process
the terrible, terrible truth,
which is that by accident, by coincidence,
not by intent that as a young man he killed his father and
subsequently married his mother. And this most horrible
combination of facts drives him--and he's already suffered
from the hybris and the atē,
and his retribution is terrible in his.
In his madness, when he discovered these
things, he tears his own eyes, blinds himself.
And, of course, now for the rest of his life,
he must just go about as a kind of a beggar, having been this
former tremendously great king. So these are examples of
what happens in Greek ethics later on, if you are guilty of
this characteristic. On the other hand,
when he, even Oedipus himself, when he understands and he
relents, and in a sense he apologizes
for what he's done, but more importantly,
he ceases, of course, to be powerful and
to act in that way, wisdom comes to him.
He understands that, he has acted immoderately.
That is the critical concept. Moderation is this wonderfully
great important thing for the Greeks.
You must act in moderation. They don't ask you to just be
humble and throw yourself on the ground and consider yourself as
nothing compared to the god, or the gods.
Be a man, be proud of what you should be proud of,
but don't go beyond limit of what is human,
because if you do terrible things will come.
Seek fame, we all want that, and I'll say more about that,
but you can't push it too far, there has to be some kind of a
reasonable human limit to what you do.
So, here is this problem. A typically Greek problem is
where there is a contradiction that you've got to live with;
you can't resolve. If you want to seek the
fullness of a human experience, you have to try to be the best
possible man, the greatest possible man to
compete successfully against others and to achieve fame,
glory, and recognition. But if you push it too far you
will anger the gods and something terrible will happen
to you. So, it seems to me,
that Western civilization, ever since, has been a
composite of these two traditions.
But there is no way to put them together, and so Western
civilization is an ambiguous society with a war always
ragging within the soul of Western civilization and it's
never perfectly clear which of the two approaches to life is
the better one. I don't know whether any of
you have ever thought about this, and anything like this
way. But if you contemplate your own
way of thinking about what you're supposed to be doing with
your life. I think you will find some
combination, if you're sort of typical, but that combination
doesn't ever have to be fifty-fifty,
and I'm sure it very rarely is. More typically,
one aspect of the culture dominates rather than the other.
But the shifts in place and time, and in many I would say,
throughout most human beings, there is a consciousness of
both. They both have some attraction
and one has to grapple with that.
So, a part of you wants to become the greatest whatever it
is that you want to become and you wouldn't be here if you
weren't very competitive and very eager to come out first,
devoted to arête and your own version of that
kind of thing. Yet, it's very easy to say to
you that's not a good thing to do.
What you should try to do is to be humble.
You should be like what Jesus suggests in the Sermon on the
Mount. Your soul is in deep danger if
you indeed continue to lead the life that you have mainly been
leading up to now, and those two things are in
conflict. I don't care if you ever go to
church, that is no longer confined to a religious
organization. It floats around in Western
civilization all the time. They're aspects of demand for
performance at the highest level, and at the time there is
a great deal of blaming people for pursuing such things instead
of humility. That's Western civilization,
friends, and the Greeks are at the root of the whole thing.
So now, let me turn to my next topic, which is to leave
the world of Homer behind us and to begin to tell the story of
how it was that the characteristic unit of Greek
civilization, the polis came into
being out of the Dark Ages about which we've said a little bit.
Let me say a little bit, first of all,
about the way scholars have categorized the history of
Greece. Typically, we speak of the
Bronze Age, the Mycenaean Period and so on, followed by the Dark
Ages, but after that,
you started having refined terms which derive actually from
the world of the history of art. That is because in the Dark
Ages we don't have any writing. So, if you want to designate
anything it has to be by tangible things like pottery,
particularly painted pottery, because it's easier to
categorize. It's from that most of our
terms show up. So, for instance,
you will see references to words like proto-geometric.
They'll be sort of post-Mycenaean then
proto-geometric. These would be the very
earliest kinds of pots that have geometric designs on them,
then comes the geometric period and the orientalizing period;
all of these refer to pottery styles. Then next we come to a
larger period, which is referred to as the
Archaic Period, the Archaic vis-à-vis
the Classical Period, which is the central subject of
people's interest in the Greeks to begin with and later on they
studied its surrounding periods. This Archaic Period is roughly
speaking about 750 B.C. to 500 B.C.
Why this period as a unit? What makes it a unit?
Well, it's around 750, a great number of the changes
that moved the Greeks away from the Dark Age kind of society to
the full scale polis begin.
And 500 but if you were being a little more precise,
you would say something like--well,
no even 500 isn't really bad, because if you think about the
Persian wars as being the breaking point,
before the Persian Wars, you're in the Archaic Period,
after the Persian Wars, you're in the classical period.
Well, the Persian Wars begin in 499 B.C.
when Miletus starts the Ionian rebellion.
So, that's really, I think, the reason for the
dating. During this Archaic Period,
some of the things that happened are these.
The isolation of the Greek towns in the Dark Age gives way
increasingly to contact with the east and the south,
and when I say the south I really mean Egypt and all around
the eastern Aegean Sea. The rise of the polis is
based upon critical, economic, military,
social, and political changes,
all of which produce a world that's really strikingly
different from the one that was just before it.
I suppose the first apparently historical event that we know
something about is the first Olympic Games,
which according to Greek tradition were held in 776 B.C.
The precision of that, of course, is not to be taken
seriously, but it gives you a general idea of when we are
talking about. What's interesting about that
is the Olympic games, like all of the Pan-Hellenic
Games, was that it was not a local
event just for one polis and maybe for a couple.
It was one to which all the people who thought of themselves
as Hellenes, which we would call Greeks, took part in.
So, that meant the concept that there is something that all of
us are--have in common, that make us all Hellenes now
exists. It's not there in Homer.
So that's one thing.Then literacy returns to the Greek
world. It is as I told you before,
not a development of the Mycenaean script which we saw,
but rather a new writing system, a true alphabet.
Most of the symbols were borrowed from a kind of a
Semitic language and a Semitic alphabet that came from
Phoenicia, I would have guessed,
or someplace near it. I think I mentioned to you that
the Greeks improved upon it and made it a true alphabet by
taking some signs that they didn't need for their own
language by turning them into vowel sounds.
If you read a--well, a good example of that kind of
Semitic script is Hebrew. If you read biblical Hebrew,
you have to supply the vowels yourself.
You have to know where the vowels are supposed to go,
and that makes it harder to learn how to read,
but when you have the vowel sounds it's easier and the
Greeks made that contribution. In one of Plato's lesser
known dialogues he makes a statement--the following
statement, which I think shows both the
typical arrogance of the Greeks and also says something true.
He says that the Greeks never invented anything,
but everything they borrowed they improved upon.
I think they probably also invented a few things,
but it was very, very characteristic of the
Greeks to borrow from the cultures they encountered and to
adapt them, to make them more useful for
their own purposes and nothing could be clearer than the
alphabet as an example of that. Henceforth, we will see writing
in Greece, but now very, very little of it.
Of course, what we have is confined to things that are not
perishable. These would have been
inscriptions either on pottery, which the earliest ones are,
or on stone, but otherwise I'm sure there
was writing on perishable material-wooden plaques,
probably not yet paper, but these would have been
destroyed. So what we have is on the
pottery. We know that the first
colony that the Greeks established was in the Bay of
Naples on the island of Ischia. They established a colony
somewhere in the 750's, and soon afterwards,
there is a colony established on the east coast of Sicily at
what we call Syracuse now, and a rash of others.
So, the Greeks are in the 750's engaged in spreading themselves
from the mainland of Greece and from the Aegean in general,
even so far out west as Italy and Sicily, and soon we know
they are in touch with just about every place in the
Mediterranean Sea. In the same period,
there is clear-cut, unmistakable,
oriental influence on Greek pottery and other things that
they make. What oriental?
That means mainly the Tigris and Euphrates,
Mesopotamia, Syria, all those older
civilizations and much more advanced civilizations than the
Greek. The Greeks are in touch with
them again and they borrow styles, copy styles,
maybe in the early day they used some of the craftsmen from
out there or maybe their own craftsmen picked it up.
However that may be, no question about it,
there was contact, interaction,
and influence. Most of the influence,
I suspect, was going one way in those days-from the more
advanced civilization of the east to the Greeks.
The Greeks are doing a lot of learning, borrowing,
and adopting. Of course, this is the period
in which the Homeric epics are finally written down now that
there is writing and that gives them,
I think, even greater impact on the Greek world in the future.
All of these things are happening about the same time as
there is a major fundamental change in farming,
commerce, and warfare, which will have very
significant political consequences as well,
but I want to postpone that story for a little while.
Let me then just turn to this phenomenon that is the
polis. The word polis appears
in Homer, but it means something different from what it means
throughout most of Greek history.
It just means a physical place, and what it appears to be is
the citadel, the fortress that was the center of the towns that
grew up after the Bronze Age, after the collapse of the
Mycenaean world. So, that's how it is in Homer.
Later definitions, however, will be expansive and
broad and as you go further and deeper into Greek history,
the claims become greater and greater.
Aristotle, in his Politics of course,
tells us the most on this subject and often he is our
source of information. But one thing is clear and
pretty early. The polis is not merely
a city state in the same way as, let us say, the Mesopotamian
city states of the third millennium B.C.
were. Places like Ur,
or Kish, towns that we know back there.
Those places were simply the place where the king or the
emperor ruled, the place where the main god's
palace was, the place where the bureaucrats
were to do their business, that's what it was,
no more than that. But immediately,
very early, you start hearing the Greeks talk about the
polis in terms that are more in your mind than in touch.
Sixth-century Greek poet, Alcaeus wrote,
"not houses finally roofed, or the stone of walls well
built, no not canals or dock yards
make the polis, but men able to use their
opportunity." If you get into the fifth
century, late in the fifth century, Thucydides in his
history has one of his generals speak to his men and say,
"men are the polis." So, we need to straighten out
for ourselves what that means? Does that mean that the place
where these people live is not the polis?
Is it only men? Well, we'll come back to that.
Let me read you something, as we move to the fullest
claims that will be made for the role of the polis.
Aristotle in his Politics says this:
"as man is the best of the animals when perfected,
so he is the worst of all when he is divided away from the law
and justice." But he tells us,
human justice can be found only in the polis,
because he says, man is by nature a politicon
zoon, an animal of the polis,
and as I told you, a man who is without a
polis by nature is above or below the category of man.
It's because man alone has the faculty of speech and the
ability to distinguish good from bad, and right from wrong.
In addition, since he is born with weapons
for the use of wisdom and virtue, he may use them for the
opposite ends. Therefore, when he is without
virtue, man is the most savage of animals.
Justice on the other hand, is an element of the
polis. The administration of justice,
which means deciding what is just, is the regulation of the
partnership which is the polis.
Man can't live without the polis,
justice exists only in the polis,
the polis is something more than a place,
it's more than the walls, it's more than the ships,
it is some kind of a thing that is spiritual it seems to me. But about the size of this
thing--let me back up. There's something else I wanted
to say to indicate this notion of men being the polis as
opposed to anything tangible. When the Persians conquered the
Greek cities of Asia Minor, when they came to the coastal
city of Phocaea, the Phocians had a choice of
either giving bread and water to the great king and becoming
subjects of the Persians--all they would have had to do was
pay taxes and do military service for the king,
since he didn't go about killing people he conquered.
The Phocaeans chose instead to take their city,
which is to say, all the people in the city,
put them on ships, sailed to the far west,
and organized a new city out there.
In fact, they landed on the Riviera in France and did pretty
well for themselves afterwards. But that's a beautiful example;
they thought they had taken their polis with them,
because they have had moved the entire city there.
During the Persian Wars, when the Themistocles is trying
to convince his fellow Greeks to stay and fight at Salamis,
but they are reluctant to do, he says okay if you won't stay
and fight at Salamis, while all our men are already
located on our ships, we will take these ships,
sail them away to Italy, and settle an Athens in Italy.
Well, the Spartans take them very seriously and they say,
okay we'll stay and fight at Salamis.
So, such a concept was a possibility. It's not the whole story though.
Let me turn to the question of the physical picture that you
ought to have of a polis. Remember there is that citadel
standing on a high hill; the acropolis as it is called,
the polis up high. There is surrounding farmland
going as far, typically, as there is either a
natural or an artificial frontier.
Typically, a mountain range will be the boundary between the
area of two poleis or a stretch of water,
because Greece has the sea winding through it everywhere.
But when that's not true, then there is a typical sort of
modern frontier, a land bridge which there a
line is-a theoretical line is drawn through it,
and on one side is one city, and the other side is another
city. There is a wonderful
archaeological discovery of a boundary stone near Athens on
which it is written on one side, this is Athens,
it is not Megara. On the other side it says,
this is Megara, it is not Athens.
So, there is that kind of a boundary as well,
and that is a place where trouble is likely to emerge.
Once the poleis are in place, they will spend a great
deal of time fighting each other.
A normal reason for fighting is a dispute about a piece of land
that is more or less on the boundary between them,
and so that's one aspect of their world.
What about how big are these things?
An answer from twentieth-century America,
very small. I think the word tiny might be
justified. We start with the most abnormal
of them in this respect. The largest polis,
of which we know, is Athens.
Unlike many poleis, Athens had been successful in
gaining control of the whole region which it dominated,
the region of Attica. So, anybody by the time history
dawns, who lives in the peninsula that is Attica,
is Athenian, even if he lives in a village
or a good size town sixty miles away;
he is still an Athenian. He can be a citizen of his
community, he can be a Marathonian, but he is also and
more primarily, he is an Athenian.
Now Attica is, in fact, approximately 1,000
square miles, which I am told is about the
size of Rhode Island, and that's the biggest
polis of which we know. There are well over a thousand
poleis. Some people want to push the
number at its height up to maybe 1,500, but it doesn't matter.
You're talking about lots and lots of them.
What is the typical size of them?
What is the typical population of them?
Well, Aristotle and Plato, both sort of theoreticians of
the polis each had an idea what's the right size for
the perfect polis. Aristotle said the right size
is a place where all of the citizens, by which he meant the
male adult citizens, could come to a central place
and hear a speaker and that number comes out to be about
5,000 male adults. Plato, being a mathematician,
as Aristotle was not, decided that the perfect
polis would have 5,040 citizens.
Why 5,040, you may ask; do we have any mathematicians
among us who will give me a quick answer to that? Tell me does it mean the same
thing as it has the greatest number of numbers that go into
it equally? That's the answer I heard.
Is that all right? Okay, enough of this
mathematical falderal. As you can see I don't
understand it. But look, here's the point.
We're talking about 5,000 adult males.
That's the ideal polis as far as these guys are
concerned. Athens was not the ideal
polis; it was big.
How many men did it have in its fullest bloom?
Somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000.
It's impossible to have a better guess than that.
Then, if you want to say, how many human beings lived in
Attica at it greatest, we are speaking about something
between a 125,000 and 300,000. But you have to understand just
from what I've already told you, this is extraordinarily large,
and I think you must realize that most poleis,
if you're thinking about 1,000 or more poleis would have
been well under 5,000 adult male citizens.
So, I just wanted to give you an idea of just how small most
of these places are as well as indicating sharp departures.
Okay, now the polis from the beginning,
and it never stopped being what I'm about to say,
chiefly agricultural communities.
Most of the people, and I think it's reasonable to
guess that a very high majority of the people would be living on
farms, engaged in farming,
feeding themselves, and the rest of the community.
Unlike the ancient near eastern cities, these towns do not grow
up around a temple or a marketplace,
confluence of rivers as they do in medieval Europe.
No, they grow up like the Athenian does,
right smack in the middle of a plain,
which is a good place for farming, with a great high
acropolis available. Even the characteristic thing
in a polis, the agora,
the marketplace, which also becomes the civic
center of these towns, even these grew up later than
the polis. They show up a century or more
typically after we know that there is a polis there,
and the agora comes about in a gradual way.
I think you should never imagine in these real old
poleis that got the thing started, that somebody said
let's have a polis. Things just happened;
they just grew up. One nice way to think about
it--here Athens is helpful. How many of you ever been to
Athens? Raise your hand.
And the rest of you, when you go--on the north
shore--north slope of the acropolis,
beyond the agora, there is the area of Athens
known as the Plaka. It's the oldest inhabited area
in Athens, and there you will find that unlike the more modern
Athens, in which streets laid out at
ninety-degree angles perfectly, it's a mess.
The streets wind around and that's because the original
streets followed the way the cattle did their wandering,
looking for food. These became the roads.
So, I want to stress the sense of natural development,
not some kind of a central authority making a decision
about anything. It is also pretty clear that
for some after the foundation of the polis,
there were no city walls. These were not defended.
Your farmland was not defended. If you had a house outside the
acropolis as you would, it was not defended.
What happened if the town was attacked, invaded?
Everybody who could ran up to the acropolis to defend
themselves. So, that's how things were in
the elementary phase. Now, there are Greek
traditions that are taken seriously by the Greeks that
suggest that kings ruled these cities from the beginning and
they have lists of kings with their names,
and sometimes with stories attached to them.
I think myself, that there were people who had
the title basileus and they were noblemen and that they had some
kind of a position of influence and authority in the state,
but as I think we have seen already, they were not kings in
the oriental sense and once we have a polis,
it looks as though we don't have kings any longer in any
shape, manner, or form.
What the kind of regime that emerges along side the
polis, is an aristocratic republic in
which the noblemen have influence and power within the
community by tradition and they are plural.
There is not one real king. There is typically a council of
aristocrats; that is the outfit that counts. Hesiod, whom I have not
mentioned to you before, a poet who we think to have
lived around 700 B.C., very early in the history of
the polis, wrote one of his poems called,
Works and Days. This poem offers advice to
farmers on how to live, but it also contains a story in
which Hesiod talks about himself and the quarrel he has with his
brother over who inherits what from the father,
and he claims he's been cheated out of his inheritance because
his brother bribed the judges. Well, who are these judges?
He calls them basileis, kings.
These would have been these aristocratic figures who we know
in the earliest days of the polis.
They were the judicial authority basing that on their
claim to divine descent on their,
certainly, noble descent, and on the fact that the
nobility had a monopoly of knowledge about what the
traditions of the community are. So, Hesiod complains about them
and calls them bribe swallowing basileis,
crooked ones, plural;
kings as in Homer. It's also interesting that
Athens has a very clear tradition of thinking they had
kings, and what I think is very
telling is the story they give us about how kingship came to an
end in Athens. Let me start by contrasting it
with what I think is fairly typical.
The Romans also had kings, I think they had probably real
kings just before the emergence of their republic and kingship
came to an end according to the Roman story,
and the republic succeeded it when one of the kings,
the last one Tarquinius Superbus (Superbus in Latin
means arrogant) misbehaved, most seriously,
by raping the daughter of a nobleman, Lucretia.
That caused a rebellion and they overthrew the kings,
and thereafter, the word king was a dirty word
in Roman history. The best example is when Julius
Caesar has made himself master of Rome, but he's still behaving
as though the republic exists. People either who want to
embarrass him--well yes, I think people who want to
embarrass him send around the story Caesar wants to make
himself king. The word for king in Latin is
rex. And so, he tried to diffuse
that with a pun by saying, Non sum rex said Caesar.
I'm not rex, I'm not king,
I'm not rex, my name is Caesar.
Well, in fact, he pretty well was ready to
turn himself into a king, but he wouldn't use that word,
because it had such a terrible smell.
Kings were despots, dictators, rapists.
You didn't want to be one. Well, look at the story the
Athenians tell. There was this king of Athens.
Codros was his name. The Athenians were invaded by
an army from the outside, and Codros led his forces out
against them. He fought brilliantly and
bravely, and drove the enemy from the field,
but in the course of the battle he himself was killed.
The Athenians loved and respected him so much that they
gave him the almost unheard honor of burying him right on
the spot where he fell in the field,
and thereafter, his name was always followed
with glory, admiration and devotion.
Well, what kind of story is that?
Why do you get rid of a kingdom? Why would you get rid a king?
Oh, I forgot to tell you. Why did they get rid of the
king? Because they thought they could
never have another so good; so, why try?
Give me a break. No, I think somebody had to
make up a story, but the memory of kings was not
of a Tarquinius. It was not of a brutal despotic
ruler, because they didn't have any such thing.
We don't know how the change came about or if--some
people question if they ever really did have kings,
but the picture I want you to have is that's not the
tradition. The tradition is aristocracy;
that's what we connect with the polis,
and of course, it was natural,
because it also fit into the world of the Iliad and
the Odyssey, which they were accustomed to
think about. I think that's a good place to
stop. Next time, I will take up the
story of the expansion of the world of the polis,
which takes the form of colonization.
