Life in the ancient world, by Michael Scott

you welcome to this fourth lecture in the darling college lecture series on the subject of life the subject is life in the ancient world and were concerned with human life in a society very remote from our own not only in terms of time over two thousand years we're also very remote in terms of the the meanings that life had for the people and yet of course it was a society for which we have an extraordinarily rich literary and artistic legacy that's because Michael Scott who teaches researchers here in Cambridge where he received his training in the very short time he's built up a very impressive academic record about the politics of Delfy and Olympia and he's got another book coming out also to be published I see you P shortly on the use of space in Greece and Rome but dr. Scott's also has an impressive record as a communicator is enthusiasm through many media and to many very different audiences I found wonderfully readable his book from Democrats to Kings fourth century Greece where he shows how society can move dramatically him backwards and he's also the writer and presenter of a growing number of quite entrancing television documentaries on the classical world it's a great delight to introduce [Applause] good evening ladies and gentlemen I wanted to begin with a thank you thank you to you all of course for coming on this cold and snowy night but much more particularly a thank you to Willie Brown the master and not just for taking a risk tonight and asking me to speak but more generally for his time and work as master of darlin College many of you will know that this is his final year and while there will be many more people far more important and eloquent than I that will sing his praises over the course of that year I wanted to just take a moment to say something as someone whose first academic job was at Darwin under his mastership and I wanted to pay tribute to his ceaseless enthusiasm his unending encouragement for the research fellows of Darwin and for providing an example of the kind of academic that many of us would like to be Willie thank you thank you very much the last time I was up on the stage was in 2010 when Professor Mary beard was talking about risk in the ancient world and I was brought up as an unsuspecting participant in a live consultation of the Oracles of a strap circus now the Oracle very kindly told me then that I would not be caught committing adultery which one useful was not as useful as it would have been if they told me that I would be up here two years later doing one of these lectures about life in the ancient world well here goes and this is as it's becoming increasingly difficult to forget an Olympic year the Olympics have a long history as we are all so often being told a history which stretches back to ancient Greece and that link between ancient and modern will be trumpeted again during London 2012 not least it's an exhibition entitled the Olympic journey to be held at the Royal Albert Hall which will tell the story of the Olympics from ancient Greece to the present day and yet just what picture of the ancient games and the Tsar links and the links with our modern Olympics do we have in our heads what it demonstrate this I need to all ask for a little audience participation now I mentioned to some members of Darwin College over lunch that I was thinking about doing a little bit of audience participation and a member of the college who shall remain nameless when eyes lighting up Oh symposium wine drinking awesome no Dean of the college wherever you are it's not that it's a simple multiple-choice quiz and here's the question which of these did form part of the ancient Olympics now the three options are the Olympic torch relay the marathon race or male athletes tying up their penises with string could I have hands up for the Olympic torch relay hands up if you think it did form part of the ancient Olympics a couple of hands okay the marathon race anyone some more hands male athletes tying up their penises with string don't know what that says about you all that you know that fact yes indeed that stone the only the last one of these that actually happened in the ancient Olympics the Olympic torch relay was instituted at the Berlin Olympics of 1936 under Hitler the marathon race while there was a Battle of Marathon in the ancient world supposedly someone did run from Marathon back to Athens but actually as a race it wasn't put into the Olympics until the first modern Olympics of 1896 male athletes tying up their penises with string on the other hand this is so demonstrated here by an ancient vars painting first outlined in EJ dingwall's 1925 thesis on male infibulation now known more as ligature or by its ancient name kind of desmet dog tying well its purpose was we're not quite sure and some argue it was to avoid unwanted erections some to simply keep the penis out of the way when running others an issue of modesty and and still others think it's an issue of sexual attraction whatever they wear tying their penises up for and it's not just in the details that there are key differences between the ancient and modern games in fact I would argue that the entire context and tenor of the games has shifted substantially the ancient Olympics were held in the middle of a religious sanctuary this is it Olympius in reconstruction they were fundamentally tied up with worshipping the gods only Greeks could compete only men could compete women weren't even allowed to watch the athletes competed naked in many events and although I've heard rumors that there's a planned naked run down the mall in front of Buckingham Palace in honor of London 2012 something which classics London Mayor of classics loving Mayor of London Boris Johnson supposedly is supporting that's quite a fool let's put that over that side I'm running naked down the mall and it's certainly not something we're gonna be seeing at the ancient games themselves nor were the ancient Olympics a very pleasant experience imagine it 40,000 Greeks also in the middle of a hot Greek summer counting tents around the sanctuary and stadium at Olympia along with all the animals and other foodstuffs to feed them imagine the animals that were also sacrificed their throats slit on some of the 70-plus altars around the religious sanctuary at Olympia the blood congealing in the heat as parts of their bodies were burnt to the gods and other parts were burnt and cooked for human consumption sometimes as many as a hundred oxen at a single go imagine the human and animal waste building up around the site from a large number of Greeks stuck there for a certain amount of time with no drainage or sanitation apart from the river it's not for nothing that the aliens who ran the sanctuary Olympia had an altar dedicated specifically to Zeus Apple moyers Zeus the Evert er of flies the ancient version of a renter kill fly zapper athletes sweating bleeding sometimes dying crowds pushing auratus philosophers historians nutcases mouthing off at every opportunity stallholders selling things politicians bickering no wonder that the ancient sources talk about the difficulties of getting accommodation even Plato had to bunk up in a stranger's tent because he couldn't find a room for himself and even the difficulty of getting transport away from the games was another massive problem and in there's even one famous proverbial ancient story that says if you wanted to punish a slave you sent them to the Olympics the ancient Olympics are beginning to sound something more unpleasant than even the worst case scenario envisaged for 2012 by the Daily Mail right now of course there are similarities between the ancient and modern games and that's exactly the point there in making links between the ancient and modern Olympics we have in fact actively shaped an image of the kind of ancient Olympics we want to be linked to and ignored the rest we have fashioned a picture of the ancient world in our minds which corresponds to what we like to emphasize in our world today now two weeks ago Robert McFarlane stood here and took talked about the different ways in which people have imagined the future as nature comes to take over the ruined remnants of our world and in this lecture I want to turn us around to look at the ruins of our past focusing particularly on ancient Greece and think about how and why over the centuries between them and ours we have gone about formulating a picture of what life was like in the ancient world and the kinds of answers that we have come up with now I want to pick up the story at the moment in which Europe long interested in the surviving ancient literature of ancient Greece started to become interested again in what was actually physically left in ancient Greece of it of ancient Greece now it might well come as a surprise that we have an always been interested in ruins it seems that we wait love our ruins don't we yet if you think that Greece and after the breakup of the Roman Empire was assumed as an unimportant and difficult to get to backwater of the Byzantine Empire and then given the split of the the Schism of 1054 it became part of the Eastern Orthodox Church and then as a result not particularly sort of the destination of choice for Western Catholics followed by its absorption into the Ottoman Empire after 1453 it's easy to see why few in Western Europe cared about visiting and about what what was there could tell them about life in ancient Greece and yet by the 15th century things are beginning to change the humanist movement in Italy fostered an interest once again not only in the surviving texts of ancient Greece but also its coins and inscriptions and gradually in the remains of the itself the famous Italian merchant many of you will heard of c-reactive and code we think this is him traveled all over the Mediterranean in the second half of the 15th century trying to map literature onto geography so what did these early explorers seek and what picture did they come back with see Reax vision of Greece informed by ancient literature was a place full of heroes legend powerful gods civic duty philosophy something expressed well I think in Raphael's famous the School of Athens painted slightly later in 1511 depicting Greek philosophers at conversation but crucially what Syriac and his contemporaries thought could be gained from this physical investigation was the evidence for a picture of an ancient world which the modern world could do well to imitate the little image of life in ancient Greece as a goal to strive for had begun to gather momentum and it's not a long step from imagining life in ancient Greece as a model - for the present - wanting to associate yourself with its surviving remains and in turn - owning them through the 15th to 17th centuries artists directly imported ancient figures into their paintings and the Kings and the aristocracies of European nations particularly England and France started to acquire ancient Greek art the ruins of ancient Greece morphed from object from which lessons could be learned - a symbol of a gentleman's connoisseurship to pawn in international power politics amongst European royalty and not in all cases with the resulting respect for the objects themselves which you might have imagined one antique column drum we know about owned by a certain mr. James Theobald during this period was apparently used as a rolling pin for his bowling-green at his home in Berkshire but as a result of this development in ancient art connoisseurship by the late 17th century the focus of interest in this idealized conception of ancient Greece was also changing up to this point the model had a fervour ancient Greece had often been that of Sparta they have 300 film fame with her uber six-packs long hair and Spartan approach to life or not Thomas Cromwell English Civil War was encouraged to be like the Spartan Lycurgus rather than any democratic athenian politician but as the arts their understanding and collection came to be more and more an honorable pursuit in 16th and 17th centuries the focus for a model in ancient greece began to shift from spartan sparta to artistic athens that is to say as the modern world's interests changed in part thanks to the reappearance of ancient greek ruins so too did the modern worlds focus on what was best in ancient greece and as a result the emphasis of the portrait painted of life in the ancient Greek world the ancient Greeks were no longer only sharpening their swords to kill they were also sharpening their tools to carve and yet while the notion of Greece and particularly Athens as an ideal was developing alongside the acquisition of bits of its ruins just what picture of life and the landscape that the world of ancient Greece was being formulated the irony is that apart from depictions in the surviving literary sources no one had a clue as to what ancient Greece had really looked like despite pilfering many of its surviving pieces of art there was still no sustained interest in investigating recording or understanding what was left of its life and landscape Raphael's School of Athens 1511 not only brings pretty much every Greek philosopher known to man in one room at the same time but puts them in a room which is pretty Roman actually when you look at it an entirely made up in 1554 century after syriaca van kkona done his travels Martin Krauss a Greek scholar at Tubingen University in Germany wrote to Theodora Segal malice in Greek a Greek in Constantinople to inquire whether Athens still existed whether it had been replaced by a fishing village Poussin's 1648 body of folk own being carried out of Athens records a key historical moment in Athens is history as presented in the literary sources but his vision of ancient Athens behind is almost entirely made up based on his imagination and from his reading of the sources indeed so flexible was the public's impression of ancient Athens that gear de sound George in the second half the 17th century was able to publish a highly successful book about Athens based on a fictional visit by his fictional brother I'm reminded of a fantastic article in the online satirical newspaper the onion in in 2010 in which ancient historians finally admitted that they had entirely made up the ancient world it started as a bit of a gag and suddenly they found source having to produce ancient pots all night long and go along and that's not quite true now Greece it seems was - a night that wasn't ideal because to some extent it was a blank canvas onto which people could impose their own ideas picked up through and there and - own interpretations of the literary sources more of what is fascinating is that for many the notion of ancient Greece as an ideal demanded the corresponding belief that there was nothing left of it to find even if they went looking a thought which extended to assuming the ignorance of the modern Greeks about their glorious ancestry so gear design George's book also poked fun at the way in which the modern Greeks actually played up to European expectations by aiming particular ignorant about their ancient culture in their presence they started acting dumb the moment a European turned up on the scene in the last decades of the seventeenth century however this interest in art began to encourage people systematically to fill in that blank canvas and record what was left of ancient Greece the capuchin monks originally sent in by the French to convert the Orthodox Greeks started making maps of ancient Athens painters attached to the French ambassador to the Ottomans the Marquis de nwando made the first sketches of the path the first detailed investigations and drawings of surviving monuments around Greece were undertaken by these two Jakob spawn and George Vila who had to convince the Turkish soldiers that they were not spies the Turks found that measuring of these ancient blocks very suspicious indeed and most of the time had to bribe them so twelve point five kilograms of coffee got spawn access to the Acropolis when he was there on his visit and by the end of the 17th century then the picture of life in ancient Greece had been established as my deal it's ruins as valuable commodities but the nature of that picture was still largely a creation of European imagination and ancient literature with increasing pockets of more detailed knowledge of surviving ruins especially in the now very fashionable to admire Athens but even those surviving pieces were themselves sometimes brutally reshaped to fit in with modern European morality the Duke de Mazarin taking over wrestlers collection in the Palais Royale in 1670 went round with a hammer knocking off the genitals of ancient statues so affront it was he by their nudity and the sense of effrontery at an attempt to disguise the seeming sexual liberation of the ancient world would continue for a long time visit any collection of ancient Greek art today and you will see any number of ancient statues that have had a fig leaf added to their nether regions not irregularly on the direct orders of the Pope himself as was the case with this statue the Apollo Belvedere and this would continue all the way through the famous story Queen Victoria absolutely hated seeing genitals on nature and statues and they have a sort of portable fig leaf that could be transported around popped in front of any statue that she was going to see by the beginning of the 18th century the ability to fictionalize completely a tour of ancient and modern Greece was no longer viable gear design Georgia's famous book was exposed as a forgery of the outrage of everyone in London by spawn and violence in its place the new craze was Homer and particularly the ability to link the locations in Homer's texts in the Greek landscape and in so doing to link life in ancient modern Greece back together because it was felt homers genius had originally emerged from a contemplation of that same landscape the pleasure of reading Homer was immeasurably improved by reading it in the locations he was talking about but at the same time that process affirmed a change in the perception of the realities of ancient Greece as Goethe later said we stopped seeing in Homer's poems a strained and inflated world of fabulous heroes and saw instead the true reflection of a primitive reality now I can't magically transport us all to Greece as much as I would like to do on this cold evening but I can at least bring Homer off the page and allow us a brief experience of what listening to Homer and the original Greek might have sounded like the recording we're about to hear is of Homer Odyssey book 9 and is provided by Antony Bowen of Jesus College who has asked me to form inform the experts amongst you that he has chosen to recite this time in 5th century attic dialect so you can just situate yourselves exactly this is the section where the hero Odysseus stabs a red hot stick into the eye of the one-eyed Cyclops monster so you can see here in this image here here's the stick going into the Cyclops monsters eye and all so run down with the laser point of where we are in the translation on the high blur and the guy up Lewis house and our youth Magdalene a sky yeoman ass spare account of the holy pure ear is died there we go imagine reading that in the Cyclops cave in part linked to this newfound desire to read Homer Insitute European knowledge of ancient Greek art and architecture was increasing leaps and bounds but it was also do more generally to the greater ability to travel in this region and indeed the social desirability of travel the Grand Tour was now a fixed part of any gentlemen's upbringing and the Society of the dilettante was formed in 1734 in England for aristocrats who had who had visited Italy and it's rumored he had to have been drunk there as well to become a member the society went on to fund numerous voyages to ancient lands and their resulting publications like that of richard chandler 1764 to 66 and critically those of James Athenian Stuart and Nicholas rivetti who published detailed plans of many of the ancient Greek temples and buildings in seven volumes after 1762 copying these structures became de rigueur the monument of life securities published here in the Stuermer vet seen here in one of the earliest photos of any of Athens's james robertson in 1853 and this is how it is today was copied far and wide as far away and and wide in fact as Philadelphia in the United States where it crowned the merchants exchange building completed in the early nineteenth century yet Greek architecture was not the only focus of interest particularly for German scholars including the famous Johann Winkelmann now the Germans had only really recently become interested in ancient Greece thanks to this new craze for Homer and the Greek landscape and vinkle Murnau led the way with his construction of the first history of ancient Greek art indeed so keen on Greece was Finkelman that he famously claimed in a letter to his friend I have never wanted anything so passionately as this the chance to visit Greece I wouldn't mind losing a finger in fact I wouldn't mind losing my balls for such a chance of getting to see those countries not joking but and here's the rub he never went despite numerous opportunities whatever his protestations the first scholar to deliver a history of Greek art did so very much from Rome and despite the distance vinkle man's influence on the nature of Greek art and thus the nature of the ancient Greek world in which it had been created was fundamental so using statues like the Apollo Belvedere the same statute to which vinkle man was forced to witness the Pope ordering the attachment of a fig leaf in 1759 Benkelman argued that the production of great art was tied to political and social freedom but he also trumpeted the noble simplicity and calm grandeur of Greek sculpture the highlighting of simplicity and grandeur made possible by Liberty chimed with the goal of the modern European enlightenment the promotion of nature and reason as a result this new vision of life in ancient Greece was able to continue smoothly as a new ideal for a new modern society and particularly in Germany the Greek ideal rose to new and giddy heights Wilhelm von Humboldt Minister of Education in the late 18th century and Prussia commented knowledge of the Greeks is not merely pleasant useful or necessary to us no in the Greeks alone we find the ideal of that which we should like to be and produce from the Greeks we take something more than earthly something godlike but did this continued indeed increased idealization of life in ancient Greece still demand a counterpart expectation of ignorance amongst the Mon Greeks well the issue is hotly debated Edward Gibbon continued the more traditional line that the modern Greeks were pale imitations of their ancestors he said it would not be easy in the country of Plato and demosthenes to find a reader or indeed a copy of their works the Athenians walk with supine indifference amongst the glorious ruins of antiquity yet some felt the exact opposite Pierre Augustine Gea's in 1771 published his account of a comparison between the ancient and modern Greeks and their values arguing that the modern Greeks had much of the ancient spirit that meant both a natural simplicity and occasionally a tendency to be in his words artful vain and not very scrupulous observers of their oaths Maggie's work was political in two ways first because it threw stones at the overly fussy and degenerate culture of aristocratic Western Europe the sentence such were the simplicity and good sense of ancient manners we are far removed from them today was actually deleted from the English translation and it's not just the English who felt themselves a target of income can also express something along these lines here against the French he said the French are irredeemable classical antiquity and the French are at opposite poles but his work also intimated that the modern Greeks currently still under Turkish occupation were merely dormant and had it in them to return to the glories of their ancient ancestors he boasted Catherine the Great of Russia as one of his avid readers and it's no surprise that she in 1770 had a hand in inciting the Greeks to rebel against the but the dismal failure of that rebellion had the unfortunate result of encouraging many to sign with Gibbon that the modern Greeks simply weren't up to their ancestors standard by the end of the 18th century then the answer to the question what was life like in ancient Greece was perhaps even more complex than it had been a century earlier on the one hand it was all about noble simplicity calm grandeur naturalism and reason that could be understood for Salmoni up close in the landscape with homer in hand and for others from afar through its art that noble simplicity made possible by ancient liberty in turn was portrayed either as a goal for modern Europe enlightenment and the Enlightenment to head towards also as a stick with which to punish those countries who were now thought to be too over sophisticated as well as cover to hint for greater political and social freedom in European society yet at the same time depending on how you read the character of the modern Greeks ancient Greece was either totally lost or in fact balanced on the edge of a comeback now I thought we might have and here is sort of a wonderful Stewart and rivetting of ancient Greece modern Greece all mixed together and particularly like the the detail of adding the birds nesting on the top of the one of the ancient monuments I thought we might need an interlude at this moment now it's often said that one of the best ways to get to know our culture is through its humor and and in fact it's rumoured that in the 4th century BC in Greece a group of 60 Athenians used to gathered by the temple of Heracles in Athens and sort of tell jokes to one another of sort of ancient version of the Cambridge Footlights smoker sessions stand-up comedy routines and philip of macedon apparently paid a huge amount of money at one point to sort of get these guys to write down their jokes and send them up to him in northern greece but we don't have that text surviving but we do have a sort of compilation of ancient jokes that has survived called the filler gelus and i thought i'd try a few out on you here to see whether you find them amusing or not and the first kind of line was about idiot jokes lots of idiot jokes from the ancient world so there was a numbskull who wanted to swim who nearly drowned and so he swore not to touch water again before we'd learned to swim when a talkative barber asked how shall I cut you a wit replied in silence please shivers groans already isn't that coming and my personal favourites in the market a man came to complain the slave you sold me yesterday has died a seller replied that's very strange he never did anything like that when he was with me despite not too much lost in translation funny lot those Greeks but I digress the 19th century was to prove no less complex in its attitudes towards ancient Greece and its image of ancient Greek life by the beginning of the 19th century in part because more and more people were travelling to Greece seeing its current state of desolation hearing about the lackluster performance of the modern Greeks compared to their ancient Greek ideal the overall impression of life in ancient Greece began to take on a foreign distant note as Leslie Hartley later put it in the novel ago between 1953 the past is a foreign country they do things differently they're an art at the same time seem to capture this distant foreign of inocent world paintings in the early 19th century is an example here and here are sort of always bathed in this haze of golden light which is the antithesis of the often extraordinarily clear outlines and quality of light natural degrees of you can get away from the Athenian smog that is even the artistic vision of ancient Greece it seems at this time was separated from the modern viewer by a mist the irony is that just as for some life in ancient Greece seemed more distant for others knowledge and attachment to the Greek landscape was also becoming stronger than ever Edward Clark travelling to Greece in 1802 1801 claimed that epidural is a region as easily to be visited as Derbyshire and it wasn't just a visiting Greece was easier than it had been it was that every part of the Greek landscape mirrored that of the English landscape so Thessaly was the Yorkshire Dales Liguori Oh was Cheltenham and at the same time the first ex expeditions in ten not just on drawing sculpture and architecture but on mapping the greed landscape set out this is the British Army officer William Martin leaked in his travels in Greece 1805 to 7:00 1809 to 10:00 esto who established the location of many of the so famed yet so far lost sights of mainland ancient Greece's is one of his maps here and whether ancient Greece was like a foreign country or whether it's modern landscape was like Cheltenham Europe still wanted to own what remained in 1801 to 3 Lord Elgin packed a hundred cases of Parthenon sculpture to ship to London in 1812 the sculptures of the temple of a fire on igano were sold to King Ludwig of Bavaria nor was this only happening in Greece the French at this time carried off the Luxor obelisk to stand in the plaster la Concorde in Paris and however we want to view those actions today at the time the main players were adamant of their moral right to do this antiquity said captain de Vernon yax and Moore who was responsible for carrying off the obelisk to Paris is a garden that belongs by natural right to those who cultivate its fruits yet in bringing these sculptures to London another debate was ignited about the nature of Greek art and ancient Greece itself seeing the Parthenon sculptures up close represented here artists and scholars expecting the kind of noble simplicity of vinkle man were astounded by the detailed rendition of human reality Greek art was no longer about a mathematical Canon of beauty it was about real human beings so fundamental was this change that many at first felt driven to deny the Parthenon sculptures entirely as a work of Greek art Richard Knight on behalf of the society the dilettante from they argued that Elgin had misidentified as Greek what were in fact Roman sculptures from the time of Hadrian it was not until 1816 that Elgin was able to convince the British Museum of their veracity and Worth and get them to buy them now the Greek war of independence 1821 s29 called the bluff on European claims to idealize ancient Greece some of Europe put their lives where their admiration led them the German sent 300 fighters to help the Greeks more than any other nation and Lord Byron famous Lord Byron who not only wrote many poems extolling the virtues of ancient Greece and vociferous Lee attacked Lord Elgin at the time for his taking of the Parthenon sculpture childe Harold but also recreated famous ancient acts like Lysander swim across the boss for us from cestus to Abydos to his beloved Byron died fighting while fighting at messolonghi as a freedom fighter for the Greeks he can be seen as he as a young man and here in his more exotic exotic local dress and this portrait can still be seen today hanging in the British ambassador's residence in Athens and also in case in case any of you were thinking about undertaking Byron's legendary swim across the boss for us from sister Abydos it's done there's a yearly event now that you can sort of subscribe and raise money for I was talking to someone who did it recently and I would advise blocking up your ears and nose with wax because the water is absolutely filthy the poor chap was ill for quite a few weeks afterwards I think it's much better to stick with Byron's pool here in Grantchester without doubt the war also helped close the gap once again between a distant ancient Greece and the modern present from the modern Greeks fighting in the war it was time to step up and be found equal to their ancestors as Alexandra's hips Atlantis one of the early Greek leaders in the war exclaimed in 1821 brave and valiant Greeks let us remember the ancient freedom of Greece the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae let us fight on the tombs of our ancestors who fell for the sake of our freedom it's interesting to note too that in the decades after the war ancient Greek names became increasingly popular in modern Greece as they sought to strengthen their connection with their past but for Europe the war of independence also ignited an ever stronger bond between modern Europe and ancient Greece as expressed through the recognition of the Greek impact on the European present John Stuart Mill in 1846 is famed as saying that the true ancestors of the European nations are not those from whose blood they are sprung but those from whom they derived the richest portion of their inheritance Battle of Marathon even as an event in British history is more important than the Battle of Hastings if the issue of that day had been different the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods the rest of the 19th century bore the fruit of this belief in and determination to foster European closeness to ancient Greece as Greece itself was tied closer into Europe with the establishment a prince ought of Bavaria as the king of the Helene's in 1833 so to progress the development of the scientific study of Greece's ancient remains along with the need to protect them by both Greeks and by other European nations so the Acropolis was declared the first archaeological site in 1834 in 1836 the first archaeological law was passed in Greece regulating what could and could not be sold and was supplemented by a second law in 1899 in 1837 the Greek Archaeological Society was founded in 1846 the French excavation school in Athens were set up in 1874 the famous Heinrich Schliemann published or rather adorned his wife with the result of his excavations at Troy and in 1876 he began to dig at Mycenae with a result here of the famous grave mask of Agamemnon in 1874 - the German archaeological Institute was opened in Athens and in 1875 the first of the big digs commenced at Olympia which was entirely buried underneath metres of new Viall sediment mrs. Olympia before and this is Olympia after the excavations got going and in 1892 finally the excavation of Delfy began as well which again was a mammoth task the entire modern village had to be destroyed and removed from above the ancient site here now a lot of fun it seems was had by the archaeologists during this time I love this photo because it's of Vilhelm daughter one of the most serious and prolific German scholars at the time but as this picture reveals he's not above a good gag with a Grecian urn which you know we all love really don't but at the same time it's important to remember that all of these works represented huge financial investment by the European nations in Greece what picture of life in ancient Greece then did these advances the birth of archeology itself as academic discipline have to offer well on the one hand of course apart from simply exposing key sites it brought huge advances in understanding their nature careful examination of temples for example during the second half of the 19th century proved that they had been painted a fact that astonished the world so used to purely white marble classical ruins who don't who now had to confront an ancient world looking like one of the kitch as places on earth this is a reconstruction in one of the Greek temples in Sicily and this a personal favorite is Heracles from the pedimental sculpture of the temple of a fire at egg you know I think you'll agree it's a rather charming multicolored lycra soup that Heracles is sportingly yet with the exception of LeMans famous discoveries at Troy in the scene II as well as the British archaeologist Arthur Evans digging at caño source and Crete the focus was most often on creating a picture of the ancient world in what was they what was considered to be its heyday the 5th century BC the Acme of the Classical period the time of the Athenian democracy Empire in the Parthenon the Acropolis for example when it was turned into an archaeological site was stripped of its complex history here so seen in the Stuart era vete Qing and brought back to the 5th century that's the ancient past we want to see and remember the development of archaeology in Greece in the resultant display of a particular era of real ancient Greece also did little to kill off the imagined ideal of ancient Greece indeed this ideal was busy more thing once again all on its own in part thanks to the age of industrialization in the second half of the 19th century the concept of Greece is a timeless intellectual hazy world was set aside in European art and it became instead of a spectacular realm of endless holiday ancient Greece was now a place of escape from the realities of the European well this is Lord Layton's Greeks play girls playing ball from 1889 which I think captures brilliantly the sense of carefree almost sensual abandonment it could do well as a santorini travel brochure front cover I think the very forces of idealization that had provoked an interest in the surviving remains of the ancient Greek world and led ultimately to the birth of archeology now not only continued unchecked by what those remains had to say but offered a very much alternative kind of picture and in the same period and in complete contrast of either the ruins all the Greek girls playing a ball the view of ancient Greek life through its surviving text was also reframed in particular by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche who published in the 1870s his work ongoing tragedy offering a fundamental revision of ancient Greece as a place of both light and dark of constructive and destructive forces for the powers of the god Apollo and Dionysus for Nietzsche the idealization of Greece was a symptom of ignorance about the real antiquity a place that it would horrify the modern world this is the modern world emerged from the Victorian age into the 20th century life in ancient Greece was simultaneously a Butlins holiday camp a world of light and tragic cruelty an everlasting ideal as well as a place whose ruins most often fifth century and if you could democratic ruins we're increasingly coming into focus and as a result could be studied catalogued and grasped just I can't resist in the side I don't know about you from following these lectures so far but one thing that's come out at me incredibly strongly is a renewed appreciation for the advances made in the last quarter of the 19th century we saw in the first lecture that Michael Aiken was showing how in 1897 the structure of a snail embryo was being brilliantly documented in detail robert mcfarlane showed how in 1885 Richard Jeffries was imagining future ruins and after London and France - Croft revealed how Thompson in 1876 was busy discovering the condition of myotonia congenita at the same time they were digging up half of Greece and also an impressive period who knows what this era will have been defined to have discovered in the subsequent lectures as we go through I can't also resist just one other small digression there one of the delightful things about Darwin is that you end up listening to conversations from people entirely unrelated to your particular field and one of these happened just the other day when you do any kind of lecture training they tell you about the minute attention span curve of your audience I see you already sort of I'm way past that but what I was told by a criminologist in Darwin recently is that it's not just a tension that wanes it's also your leniency that nosedives a famous study of Israeli patrol bore a parole board's excuse me Israeli parole boards was done that showed that and while over the course of the entire day they gave about a third of people parole actually that was at 65% just after breakfast after morning coffee after lunch and after afternoon tea and that went all the way down to about thirty five percent just before morning coffee before lunch before so wine is not that far away I promise I'm craving your indulgence for just a little little while longer please give me parole ancient Greece continued to play its role as an inspirational ideal well into the 20th century buses in London during World War one carried excerpts from the speeches of Thucydides as inspirational adverts only possible because ancient Greek literature was so well embedded you know in the education system indeed it was felt that somehow the modern Western European world was now tied tight with ancient Greece an entire reverse from the period just a century before when that sense of distance had suddenly raised its head in a Berlin bookshop not long ago I came across her a 1921 volume edited by richard livingston on the legacy of Greece and the preface that he writes makes this European close relationship with ancient Greece very clear this is what he says in spite of many differences no age has had closer affinities with ancient Greece than our own history does not repeat itself yet if the 20th century searched through its past for its nearest spiritual kin it is in the 5th and following centuries BC that they would be found again and again as we study Greek thought behind the veil woven by time and distance the face that meets us is our own younger with fewer lines and wrinkles on its features and with more definite and deliberate purpose in its eyes for these reasons we are today in a position as no other age as being to understand ancient Greece to learn the lessons it teaches and inst the ideals and fortunes of men with whom we have so much in common to gain a fuller power of understanding and estimating of our own now one of the ironies of this close family bond between early twentieth century Europe lords academics at least and ancient Greece is that at exactly the same time the art world which had for so long fan the flames of idealized interpretations of Greece at the beginning of the 20th century began to dispense with it so post impressionist artists like Suzanne started labeling it's imitation pernicious and the Dada movement in the 1920s suggesting suggested letting lar corn one of most famous ancient sculptures Hellenistic known for a Roman copy and his children the Dada movement said let Lachlan and his children rest after their thousand-year long struggle with that fine sausage of a serpent yet it's also important to realize that this sense of affinity felt in intellectual circles between ancient and modern Greece did not cover over the seeds of doubt sowed by Nietzsche and others about the dual nature of the ancient Greek world it's light and dark creativity and cruelty in an article in livens Livingston's volume entitled and this is the best title of any article I've ever read entitled the value of Greece to the future of the world by Gilbert Murray he tackles this Janus like quality on the one hand the language of Greek poetry has an austere beauty because the people were in his words habitually toned to a higher level of intensity and nobility than ours on the other Murray argues the Greeks were separated by a thin and precarious interval from the savage scratch a Russian Murray continued and you find a wild tartar scratch an ancient Greek and you hit no doubt on a very primitive and formidable being somewhere between a Viking and a Polynesian the dual savage and cultured nature of ancient Greece has not been of course the only fascination for academic scholarship during the 20th and 21st centuries although the the Viking polynesian contrast kept me fascinating for quite a while it would be impossible here to list all the developments across the fields of classical study and how they have impacted upon our impression of life in ancient Greece but it it's crucial to note that while many of these developments and their resulting impressions have come about thanks to new critical theories or new technologies just as many of them have been motivated principally thanks to pressure as in previous centuries from wider historical social and political attitudes and events so Hitler's championing of the competitive elitist aspects of ancient Greece ensured that money was available for the Germans to dig out the stadium at Olympia which had hitherto mr. the stadium here which had hitherto been left uh next gate it in contrast post-world war ii with europe exhausted america came to the fore in archaeology in europe with the study of ancient greece exploding but with a very particular emphasis on ancient Greece's credentials for freedom and democracy where the resulting swing back from olympia to athens in 1952 to six the americans paid to rebuild the store of Attalus here in the agora in athens and in contrast scholars have shown how russian interest in ancient greece dating back to Catherine the Great was precondition for much of the 20th century by the politics of the Soviet Union with its scholars choosing to emphasize in ancient Greece which was a pre capitalist social system relying on slave modes of production and even the development of the European Union project after 1958 encouraged many to emphasize the Panhellenic united aspects of ancient greece particularly at Tsang trees like Delfy olympia or d loss as forerunners of this modern european idea so when unesco made Delphia world cultural heritage site in 1987 it cited as an explicit reason delphi's enduring ability to bring people together and how you may ask amongst all this have the Greeks themselves characterized life in ancient Greece or from being lampooned as ignorant of their ancestry during the 17th century the Greeks created an active linkage with it in the run-up to and following the war of independence in the early 19th century that link of course is still with us today and very strong Alexander the Great was recently voted as the greatest Greek of all time on Greek national television and it's a heritage they guard with high passion a German magazine is currently being sued in the Greek courts for representing an ancient Greek goddess raising her finger to Europe yet modern Greece has also sought to mix that ancient heritage with another critical element of their of its past that of Byzantine and Orthodox Greece there is still in Greek a term excuse my pronunciation Greeks amongst you hello in Orthodox sauce polities Maas Greek Orthodox civilization which evokes a blending of ancient Greece and Orthodox Christianity in which some continue to call on as an ideal moreover their view of life in ancient Greece has remained far from static in in post-world War - Greek poetry for example the ancient landscape is no longer blue skies and sunshine but a place of oppressive desolation and furthermore Greece itself has the difficulty of having to face up to the issue of how to live their modern lives amongst the ruins of ancient Greece now this came to a head during the heavy summer fires in 2007 when fire engines were diverted from saving modern Greek houses to protect the ancient stones at Olympia this is the scene of the fire damage on the hill these are the stones of Olympia here the fire damage here for some Greece at least that decision was wrong and the nation had its priorities wrong ancient Greece for some in Greece had become very much a weight around their necks now as one of my rather keen students once said this is all very interesting but what's the point ask an impertinent question and you're on your way to a pertinent answer I said and the point is that our vision of life in ancient Greece has always been tied tightly to the events attitudes and needs of our own world as a result our impression of ancient Greek life and the level of importance it has for modern society has not just changed over time but has also been dynamic and multiple at any one time it is morphed been contested and circled around time and again as a fictional ideal and primitive reality distant foreign land and family member place of noble simplicity savage cruelty to name but a few of its incarnations as the archaeologist Michael Shanks put it in 1996 the classical past does not reveal itself in its essential character it has to be worked for this leads us to the question what sort of classical past do we want or as the 1989 bluffers guide to classics puts it in many Bluffs you run the risk of coming across someone who might spot you but with the classics you may assume a reckless confidence as academics can never agree about anything harsh but perhaps not unfair sometimes and the bluffers guide brings out I think another important point because of the way in which Europe and America amongst others have particularly kept the changing world of ancient Greece and equally Rome in this picture over the centuries front and center in their mindsets though that world is perhaps not only more highly debated than other subjects in the bluffers guide series but also as a result has a power which punches way above its weight in comparison to other great periods of world history so the question might become to your lips well what about the future will that continue as it has done in the past the argument has been made many times by classicists themselves that we cannot rely on ancient Greece to have the same kind of stake if indeed any stake in the 21st and coming centuries as it has done in the past and many of you will be aware of the continuing fight for the relevance of studying the ancient world in school as well as at university level who can forget Boris Johnson in his toga outside Parliament championing the savior of ancient history a level now that war is certainly not over but I think some battles are being won for sure putting excerpts of Thucydides on buses as inspirational messages would look a little bit odd now I think and I doubt that anyone would claim as Livingstone did that we are a sort of mirror reflection of ancient Greece or agree with John Stuart Mill that marathon is more important than Hastings but on the other hand the evidence is I think that the study of the ancient world continues to have relevance and more importantly to thrive or to thrive and captivate numerous individual societies associations and projects for example are working hard at grassroots level helping with the often very popular reintroduction of ancient languages into our schools and despite some universities narrowing their ancient worlds study options others are actually increasing their provision and numbers of students in classics related subjects at universities in the UK remains healthy popular interest is also strong we have films like the 300 which took 72 million dollars on its opening weekend I realized I had a typo in this just before I came up here that I'd actually just written 72 dollars in its opening weekend which doesn't sound so impressive but 70 million is much better and not bad for ancient history and the number of films about sword and sandal epics about the ancient world just continues to sort of grow and grows and the sequel to Clash of the Titans is on our screen soon make sure you go and watch more frivolously if we can take these things as indicators Vera Wang's ancient Greece wedding dress is apparently one of the most popular in her collection and this is like risque image coming up here so turn away if you want to and Karl Lagerfeld himself modestly said that what Homer did with the pen he did with the camera lens when he dedicated the 2011 Pirelli calendar to Greek myth Karl Lagerfeld comparing himself to Homer nice one nor has ancient Greece died as a comparative ideal when I was teaching in a university in Rio in 2010 the police there were being hailed as Spartan heroes it was a language that could be used in the daily newspapers which had currency had value American marines are often being compared to Spartans and officers are even issued with books on Spartan history as part of their training written I think by members of the audience here tonight and with the current Greek economic crisis as litmus test of the wider world financial problem it's not surprising that once again we find ourselves reading lots of articles about ancient ideals and modern realities my favorite was that apparently according to the newspapers the first global economic crisis in history was in ancient Greece when a number of city-states in the fourth century BC were unable to pay back their loans to the Temple of Apollo on Delos they have always been causing us trouble the cycle it seems of interest in and debate over life in ancient Greece this seems to be continuing there is a saying that only the future is certain it's the path that's always changing now well I hope to have shown you that the past is always most definitely changing my bet is that the only certainty about the future is that it will continue to do so none of this should make us complacent in any way if interest in life in ancient Greece is to continue in the longer term it will only be because the argument for its continuing intellectual social political and cultural relevance continues to be forcefully made and won both an academic educational and most importantly public arenas but for my part I think that in that continuing debate we need to be more insistent on two aspects of life in ancient Greece as these two aspects that I want to leave you with firstly as with the ancient Olympics example with which we started we need to work hard to keep in mind both the attractive and non attractive bits of the ancient world a place of beautiful things and ideas sure but also full of difficulties and dangers that had to be lived with by the people on a daily basis and second is that ancient Greece was not a monolithic hole but a place itself filled with a myriad of different views and approaches to life which were all changing and adapting to the wider world around them and if I were to leave you with just one impression of life in the ancient Greek world tonight I would like it to be that not just a place of beautiful ruins philosophers and six-packs but a place packed full of vibrant and sometimes very different ideas and forces evolving within a harsh challenging and uncertain world a place we may want to admire but difficult to pin down and one I would wager few of us would ever like to find ourselves for real thank you very much indeed for your time well Michael thank you for the appetizer for the London Olympics not not least in Prior epic fashions it's deeply reassuring for those of us like myself who lost out on the ticket lottery I suppose it's trite to say that the past is a mirror in which we see ourselves what I found so interesting about Michael's talk was the in the past we see what we'd like to be like and how that continues over the over the ages and how if that isn't what you find in the past you bash the stones about until you you get them to confess it no you won't escape view the the irony that we've been hearing about this strange idea idealistic view of classical Greece at just the time when the Greek economy is threatened and indeed G of course Greek democracy will be threatened by the Greek crisis and thereby threatening the whole European dream but that was great fun right Michael thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Darwin College Lecture Series

Views: 24,647

Rating: 4.7472119 out of 5

Keywords: Drwin college, Darwin Lectures, Darwin COllege Lecture Series, University of Cambridge, Life, Dr Michael Scott, ancient world, life, ancient Greece, Classics in schools, History Channel, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, BBC

Id: JNn4_mE6LLA

Length: 60min 0sec (3600 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

It’s a question we have always been asking: what was life like in the ancient world? But just as interesting and important is a slightly different one: how have we, over the past centuries, chosen to examine and answer that question? This lecture will focus on the changing attitudes to telling the story of the ancient past, and particularly the weird and wonderful world of ancient Greece. It will investigate the questions we have asked, the ways in which we have gone about answering them, and the resulting pictures of life in the ancient Greek world that we have created, from the first characterizations of ancient Greece by the Romans to the latest cutting-edge 21st century scholarship. In a year when the Olympics come to Britain, and our minds turn inescapably towards the connection between the ancient Greek world and our own, there is no more important time to think about just how we know what life was like in the ancient world. By telling such a story, and by demonstrating how we are always implicated in creating the picture of our past, this lecture will argue that the question ‘what was life like in the ancient world’ tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the ancients.

Biography

Dr Michael Scott is a Research Associate and Affiliated Lecturer at Cambridge, and formally the Moses and Mary Finley Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College. He has written on a variety of ancient Greek and Roman world themes and places for both academic and trade publishers (Cambridge UP, Princeton UP, Wiley-Blackwell, Icon). During his time as research fellow at Darwin, he was a co-organiser of the 2010 Darwin Lecture series on Risk, and is looking forward to this experience on the other side of the fence as speaker. Michael is committed to communicating his knowledge of the ancient world to as wide an audience as possible, and is a regular speaker at schools and school conferences around the country, as well as being part of the Mayor of London’s Olympics 2012 ‘Classics in Schools’ initiative and of the Olympics 2012 Cultural Programme. He lectures and guides in both the UK and Greece for schools, universities, business organisations and cruises, writes for a variety of international newspapers and magazines and has appeared on UK and Greek radio, as well as writing and presenting TV documentaries for the History Channel, National Geographic and the BBC (Delphi: bellybutton of the ancient world 2010; Luxury in Ancient Greece 2011). www.michaelcscott.com @drmichaelcscott

This talk is part of the Darwin College Lecture Series series.

[u/DER_PROKRASTINATOR]

Awesome, thanks for sharing.

[u/tropicalpickles]

He is fantastic. If you fancy laughing and learning, check him out at BBC's You're Dead To Me podcast in The Spartans and The Ancient Olympics episode!