Rise of the City: The Greek Polis: Imagining the Ideal City

[Music] well good evening everybody we have a few more people still coming in so we're just gonna start the introduction fairly slowly I won't talk too slowly I promise my name is Steve tinny and you may remember me from last year it's nice to have you all back those you have come back and for new faces welcome this will be our home this year for the greats lectures the series is sold out but I believe they are selling some tickets on the door as well for you can see not everybody shows up um so this year our theme is the rise of the city and it's a nice tie-in with the biggest reinstallation of galleries we've seen in many decades here at the Museum which is our new Middle East galleries which will open in April 2018 I've been deeply involved in that process myself I'm really excited by it in part because it's almost done it's been a huge job we have about fourteen hundred objects in the three rooms so plans are come more than once and we've selected speakers we've got a little bit on a tangent to what we usually do with the Great's and we've selected speakers who can give us sort of a 360 of what cities are why they exist how they come to be the different parts of world and environments they they grew up in and the reason for that is that the subtitle of the Middle East galleries is journey to the city and we follow the not a simple linear progress but we discuss cities from their very very first origins in simple agricultural villages that produce something like the famous first wine Jura oldest wine Jura which has been fully restored and will be on display through to early Mesopotamian cities temples the city of war they'll be an entire room devoted city of floor half of which is devoted to the gold materials essentially from the royal tombs O'War which will be really spectacularly laid out so you have time to appreciate it in space to appreciate it and then in the third room we will have a little bit of a breathless rush from about maybe 12 1300 BCE to the present day if you blink you'll miss it but it's actually all very interesting because there are several story arcs and some of them will come out in these talks and some of them you'll see in the gallery so we look forward to welcoming to the gallery when it's open at the end of April the next lecture in our series will be on November 1st and will feature our own dr. Joseph Wagner associate curator in the Egyptian section who will be talking about the lost cities of ancient Egypt and as usual after our speakers presentation there'll be some time for Q&A I believe that Tina is going to walk around with the microphone in this smaller space we don't have the microphones in the aisles but if you could take the microphone for your questions it'll make it easier for everybody to hear and so disliked speaker he's going to introduce us to some of the philosophy behind the city to begin with I want to avoid claims of plagiarism by admitting that at first I'm simply going to read excerpts from his bio because it is so impressive that I did not feel I could improve it by editing Peter struck is the Evan C Thompson term professor and chair of the department of classical studies in the School of Arts and Sciences the University of Pennsylvania he is director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars Program and founder of its integrated studies curriculum he is co-founder with Sarah ego of the National Forum on the future of liberal liberal education and has worked with foundations news organizations and scholarly societies to promote the liberal arts he has won multiple teaching awards at Penn for innovation including a Lynn back award the university's top teaching prize he has published extensively on the intellectual history of Greek and Roman antiquity his book birth of the symbol ancient readers of the limits of their texts won the Goodwin award from the American through logical Association for best book in classical studies I'm almost done his most recent book is divination in human nature a cognitive history of intuition in antiquity and he has published widely on ancient philosophy religion magic and divination and literary criticism and given dozens of lectures at universities in the United States and Europe and we're very happy to have him back to lecture again in the great series so I could go on but I feel the excerpts make my point they could hardly be somebody more qualified to talk about this topic to you and I would like to add a personal note you've heard me say similar things this before it's very heartfelt and the museum is really blessed not only with his own highly professional staff and curators many of whom also hold faculty appointments but also with an amazing network of supporters across campus particularly in departments like Classical Studies Peter was the faculty supervisor last year of one of our undergraduate research students in our Penn Museum Fellows Program as well as agreeing to speak here tonight in our flagship public lecture series with an ease and alacrity that relieves us all I can tell you we are enormous ly grateful to all of our colleagues who so often demonstrate their support and commitment to the museum in ways like this and it's a pleasure to be able to know to be able to acknowledge our thanks to Peter for his support as well so thank you Peter please join me in welcoming he distracted [Applause] well thank you very much for that introduction Steve I wish I could live up to it I'll try Minoo gainsaying the last bit we are very enthusiastic supporters of what the museum has done it's a model I think for us in the humanities some some was working on the more arcane side of things to find a space to speak to a broader audience about what it is we're up to and why it's important and it is heartfelt also coming from me to see a crowd like this that would come out and wanna what Wednesday night and listen to someone talk about ancient philosophical ideas of cities but oh you'll tell me at the end whether I whether it went well I hope so so I am in the museum like oh I come here and I'm supportive and I'm happy to be here I am mostly though and we talk a lot about the importance of material culture in my field I'm mostly just by disposition not because I think it's the right thing to be but by disposition I'm mostly an immaterial list I like people thinking about imagining how material things might work but I don't know my way around the material world at all I'm much happier in the world of ideas so what I'm going to talk about mostly tonight his ideas and imagination and I'm the ideal imagining of what a city could be among a group of different thinkers I'm gonna look at my talk today in three parts focusing on Homer for a little while and then Plato and then Aristotle and we'll talk about how they thought a city what they thought of city was and how it worked so just a couple of ways places to begin here is our Greek term Pallas what we'll be focusing on today for most of the deceiving for most of the talk and it's going to have slightly different definitions and the different thinkers that we look at but this is the term of the English the characters in the Roman alphabet that correspondent make it look like this and our translation of city that's a good place to start but there's gonna be much more than we unpack about what this word is all about so we are we gonna be in our talk here's the mediterranean wide expansive world dozens of cultures with rich deep histories I'm gonna be focusing in just basically this piece right here so we're gonna work on one small part of this ancient Mediterranean world when are we sorry okay you know I always I always think I disappear though when we do the life as long as you all don't go to sleep no pillows allowed okay I said I mean I see that Bob it's just I know how comforting it is to be okay you can see so when are we well there's now and then go back 2,000 years and you make it to the center of Rome okay so that's already a big jump five hundred years before that and we're at classical Athens two hundred fifty years before that we'll with Homer and then five hundred years before that with the Trojan War so we're dealing with big hunks of time in this talk I'll spend the first part talking about the Trojan War and this is going to be Homer's rendition of the Trojan War so we're looking at an account of the 13th century that comes from 500 years after the fact and then I'm going to focus in on classical Athens and that'll be the police that I spent the second two thirds of the want to just give you a little bit of terminology about these different periods the prick just in case it's gonna be pertinent to bring up these terms here or there before the 1100 before 1100 BCE the Bronze Age Bronze Age that'll be the time of that Homer is depicting in the Trojan War Dark Age intervenes between the Bronze Age and Homer Homer begins the archaic period and then the Classical period is a speared from 512 323 well we'll spend two-thirds of the time today so bronze archaic period in Classical period those are terms you'll probably be mentioning so we're gonna start off with this person Homer this is a representation of Homer or someone else is the old joke but it's true enough we really have no idea this is what they thought Homer probably would have looked like seven hundred years after the fact and whether they were basing that on memory or some other rendition of Homer and another material that didn't survive we just don't know he was in the 8th century BCE and he hands down to us the epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey and it's hard to overestimate how powerful he he is and the evidence that comes from from Homer and by that I mean no we we have written records before Homer in the Greek material but they're basically you know receipts from buying 10 goats from some guy where the border is between my property near property that kind of thing we got little shards of written down things that survived and then all of a sudden here tens of thousands of lines of beautifully crafted epic poetry just opening up a rich intense strenuous picture of a culture at psychology its realities its values and so home Reza witnesses to us she's irreplaceable it's also the case that we don't have a lot of written records to corroborate anything that Homer says so Homer kind of gets a free pass and people who love Homer and they probably love that about him people who are annoyed by Homer so what's home we're talking about with respect to our topic today Homer is talking about Troy Troy a massive Citadel across the Aegean Sea from from mainland Greece it is well known at its time as a wealthy city it is run by a family headed by a figure called Priam and it has relations with Greek city-states around the Aegean Sea so much is what we know from we if I were given this lecture or 125 years ago I might say something like no this is the that I wouldn't have this picture first of all and I would say something like you know the Trojan War we think might have happened but we're not sure it would be sort of equivalent to talking about the trip of Jason of the Argonauts lots of tales from antiquity and this just happens to be a tale about the Trojan War then are my colleagues in archaeology who made this museum and there are other colleagues at other universities went and did some digging at the site that they thought was probably the logical place were they where Troy would have been and lo and behold they found a massive very wealthy Citadel that had been overrun many times in its history and one very specific likely one very massive time is over one around 1250 BCE around the traditional date of the Trojan War so we call that Troy we call the erased it in 1250 the Trojan War and that's probably now reasonable to say that there is a historical underpinning to Homer's epic let's just say to the general flow of Homer's epic we found no details at the place to corroborate in any specific details in Homer and you're gonna be sure that we look hard for them you know there was not nothing that said Priam slept here or you know this is the shield of Achilles I mean and and you know that they scrutinized every single piece so none of the specifics of Homer are corroborated here but we do have a general sense that such a thing happened so what is a city yes Homer represents it well Troy is our example and it's already interesting that to start thinking about it because the city such as we have it in homers text is the city of the enemy it's the city of the folks that we've been fighting against we see the Trojans at home we see the Trojans it with families who care about them that missed them that are crying over them we see fathers and sons while we see lives and daughters and the whole gamut of rich household family life embedded in the city it happens through homers depiction of of our Trojan so what is their city what are the basic components of it well the walls of Troy being focus of Homer's epic of course because our Greek army is trying to conquer Troy so they're concerned about its walls we hear a lot of description of those they enter into different pieces of the narrative the famous scene with some of the Great's of the Trojan group sitting up on the walls looking out over the Trojan or over the battlefield and identifying different Greeks and Trojans out there introducing us to the characters they're impenetrable very tough to get through the Greece to find a way through but not by breaking them they sneak in Odysseus uses Trojan horses inside there in addition to the walls we have a Citadel top stronghold so that should these walls be breached that would be the place where we could hole up there are there was also temples and a main temple at the center of the Citadel also protected the temples at a standard piece of these large early Bronze Age settlements these Bronze Age cities so that's represented well and Homer in addition to the walls the Citadel at the temple and then also always a marketplace marketplaces where things are done your political collection is made around the marketplace also the economic activity centers in the marketplace and one thing that might be of some maybe usefulness and trying to figure out what a marketplace how our place figures into what we're talking about Agora is the Greek term for a marketplace when you make that into a verb Greek has a way of doing this the ending and put on an EU and then the whole was just the personal ending I go Rayo so making the noun for market into a verb in other words what we've called marketing for us it's like selling stuff I mean it used to be for the Brits it's going and Bonnie or butter for us I suppose it's figure out a way to sell marketing and Greek just means to talk so their term the verb built out of that word for marketplace is getting together collectively and hashing things out it's a place for a conversation in addition to a place for the economic and political activity now in Homer saw rendition we have a few cities that come up I've listed them here this is actually a representation of the long list in book 2 of the Iliad of the catalog of ships Homer wants to go through and tell you about the huge expanse of the Greek population that's present here at Troy and he goes through and lists individual Citadel's and income from none of them as grand as Troy although Mycenae probably close to his grandest Troy but not quite there all these would be lesser versions of that slide that we saw in the beginning with walls citadel a temple in which the Civic religion of the sea unfold and in the marketplace so these are a beginning point to see this where Homer uses the this designation of city now how does this function in huh restore your city city is a chief marker of your identity it's among a group of three that are the most important markers of your identity number one is your name so your name embodies who you are then then your lineage who are your parents where did you come from and then number three your city so where you're from it is as important as your name of your parents now your city is the full and complete description of where you're from so I'm guessing for most of us here there would be no question about our own affiliates someone want to say where are you from right you might have multiple answers from Pennsylvania from the United States from Philadelphia in this context there would be no question of deep soul and unique identifiers of any individual person is their city what is he a significant he also has a kind of larger tribal affiliation with others nearby him you might be a be ocean or a Thracian or that's just or something uh it's it's not who you are and it's surely not the case that at least for the Greeks at this time that being a Greek was something that meant anything to anybody what meant something irreplaceable to everybody was their city so it was the chief marker of your identity over and over we see Homeric heroes identifying themselves who are you what's your name where do you come where your wealth your parents and where do you come from so the city functions in this way as a kind of core piece of identity now most of what I've talked about so far is going to be applicable to the later cities but there's some distinctive elements in Homer as well that are particular to this particular time this early stage depicting one way I think to think about what a city is in this early imagination 1250 BCE is to think about it as a kind of macrocosm of a microcosm the microcosm is a household and the city is like the big house of the king so let's take just a quick look at what a house was in this world we've got here a representation of Odysseus health in the house in Ithaca something that we run into in the Odyssey the house has a public space called an outlay and that would be where people would come the UPS guy would show up and be at the outlay your friends might be there before they come inside it's a collection space most anyone could just have a walk on in there without invitation the public space cities all have these public spaces marketplace being the key one then inside of there is the OI cost that's the household itself it has rooms in which the family would do their entertaining so it's got spaces in which dinner parties would happen close friends would come and causes area then inside of the way cos are the inner rooms where people sleep where they'd have their private quarters and this is even more private and more intimate kind of space and remember that layout that we had from a representation of Troy a very broad area and which people that had business with the city might show up a more closed in area where the family of the king would have its special place to do its entertaining and its connections with others and then a more intimate inner space that would be the you know inner hallways of the city itself and of course through there now this is a certain kind of political organization obviously that's represented by this understanding of the city this is a time in which great Kings ran individual city-states Mycenaean period Troy was on this model Mycenae on this model and the other great city-states at the time they were independent fiercely independent mostly fought against each other on occasion they would gang up in groups and go fight against some other so when the truck won the Greeks show up here to annihilate Troy they have for the time being put aside their differences so that the city-states are not fighting Greece is not fighting among each other and put alliances together to go on fight Troy Troy's done the same thing with city-states nearby yet to have a group function mostly what these are independent actors as political units on occasion they'll find a reason to band together okay there is a particular specifics of the way cities get worked out hey if you all have not read The Iliad in a while go back and have a look at book 24 Achilles has killed everybody he's been sulking inside I'm sorry he started the epic by mostly sulking inside of his tent and then he finally comes back out because he wants to punish Agamemnon because Agamemnon didn't do right by him so he decides as a young man that the right thing to do is to pout and let all of his friends get hurt and that's gonna hurt not well so he he has kind of made this into his City his little tent is where he's kind of goes out it does all his killing then he's back inside of the city Priam now absolutely distraught because his son has been killed but Achilles goes back to Achilles his hut leaves his city of Troy which you this and goes into Achilles this tent Achilles this tent is more secure than prions city is and their Achilles runs things like a king of a city does so when Priam comes in it's like an embassy to a foreign country Priam done makes his case to Achilles that it's time for him to give back the body a factor that Achilles has been torturing desecrating after he's killed Hector and Achilles and pre-op make a connection and Achilles finally sees some sense in what mercy might bring and does and the only act of mercy really in the whole epic give over the body it is at the same time a connection of I think the city of Troy with the city that have been killing something for himself don't have to tell you about the importance of Ithaca in the Odyssey what is this is consistently and always trying to get home it's his City and he's going to come back to and his city is part of what who he is his family his wife his Ennis and his son okay so a little bit and we'll move from that opening understanding of how the city functions in homers tale and talk a little bit about another time so we'll move forward now from a representation of 1250 BCE up to the Classical period and so here's another representation of the Greece and down here so historical Athens at its height a round of 500 BCE grew to a city with a total population of around 500,000 people I was massive for the time there were forty to fifty thousand citizens and the rest were non-citizens because they were the wrong gender or because they happened to be visitors from other places and didn't make sense to grant citizenship to someone who wasn't over the place the city was very homogeneous ethnically it was understood to be basically a large extended family and it was very cohesive it was knit and built together the city of Athens grew to this size of 500,000 between a period of about two hundred years from about 7,000 to about or sorry from about 700 BC to about 500 BC massive growth it was in about 10,000 range about 10,000 people in 700 BC and it grew to this 300 500 thousand just 200 years so a huge expanse during this time the Athenians now extremely wealthy wow that makes the city grow and as they're doing this they also come up with some inventions that have an important legacy in human culture they invent tragedy they invent democracy and they invent philosophy now I could go on a little bit about what I mean by that I'll just say this about philosophy it's true the Greeks did not invent deep thoughts right so since we've known of humans we imagine that they probably have had deep thoughts but the Greeks invent does your honor of writing that investigates thoughts only for themselves and it is becomes invented a couple of generations before the next figure we will talk about the personal good focus on here Plato puts the most distinctive stamp other here's where philosophy and the Western tradition really emerges philosophy as a whole Plato states our 427 to 347 BCE his masterwork is probably fair to say that it's the Republic you were great numbers of dialogues but the Republic is the most extensive of them all aside from the laws but it's dreadful it's really hard to read the Republic is magnificent the Republic is so Plato's great work and what it focuses on is our topic today Plato wants to talk about the city and how to make a perfect one of those how does this come up in his in his investigation well he's starts off with a question of what is justice and he's he as Plato has Socrates sitting around with a group of people who are tossing out ideas about what justice the best definition of justice might be some spin out what is a Homeric idea of justice which is that you should help your friends and harm your enemies standard okay standard sort of Homer's world is clear it is morally unambiguous well that's not true it's morally deeply on the us but you it's always right to help your friends and hurt your enemies that's just it's not that's not complicated now that's tried out in this context of plato's book one of the Republic and it's shot down instantly it makes no sense to talk about that as a standard justise someone else slightly more cynical young younger person stands up and says well there's really no justice it's only you know the will of the stronger that's what winds up being declared to be just Socrates shoots that down pretty quickly so you're claiming that if someone who was stronger put a gun to your head and decided for no reason to threaten you and steal all your stuff that that would be just and the person has to say well no Socrates it doesn't seem so okay so fine so maybe there is such a thing as justice what's it going to be um the ideas that are tossed out don't hold water so by the end of the first book Socrates says well we're gonna have to start off I'm figuring out what justice is by the time they start moving through the second book and there's ten of them he says you know this is getting confusing it's hard to figure out what justice is with an individual so let's zoom out and look at the natural grouping of what human beings are as a large clump that's a city so let's try to find out what justice is in the city so this philosophical investigation that started out trying to figure out what justice is turns out to be an investigation of how you're supposed to build the best city so he starts off a couple of vectors this is a very beginning point socrates is talking to his interlocutor here adi mantas Socrates tells us a city comes to exist I believe because none of it is in done of us is individually self-sufficient but each has many needs he cannot satisfy or do you think that a city is founded on perhaps some other principle no Sarkis then because we have many needs and because one of us calls on another out of one need and a third out of a different need we gather many into a single settlement as partners and helpers and so we call such a shared settlement city isn't that itself okay so this seems like a good place to start we've got our beginning of a city people get together and help solve problems that they can rely on each other collectively to help one another out we start off then Socrates goes down and narrates what this city is going to look like he talks about that are getting together there's going to be a specialization of Labor and the first city with this small groups of people they get together as they're not fulfill basic human needs it gets food on the table in a more efficient way than we could individually by ourselves and provide shelter for us and give us clothes on our back and Socrates says well okay fine so that's a start but that's not much and he says well that's actually just a city for pigs he keeps food in our bellies but we've got other purposes than that don't we so what else do we need well his the people he's having this conversation with jump instantly to the idea that well what we really need is to have luxuries not sure about that but okay fine so let's get some luxuries in there and if we start doing that and grow and get bigger well we're gonna need an army to protect us that's when things start to get really serious we're gonna need an army so what are we gonna do to make sure that that army can run this city well that's a big question so we're about third of the way through the Republic and Plato at this point says how are we gonna produce rulers that can rule us well to make a good city insta- that's just to make a city that's just mean to me those that behave just way now there are some times I think when you run into questions like this where people will say yeah you should just do the right thing right you should just be just how hard could that be well through your fourth and fifth maybe six decades you start to realize that well in fact is a huge amount that's difficult to figure out and difficult to find and our friends at I think it was Google what was their their corporate motto don't be evil Thanks all right thanks that's what terrifies me most I mean I love engineers so the best friends or anything is well you've got a bunch of engineers out there who think that that's the kind of moral complexity they're gonna face I was really scared scary scary excuse me so by contrast Plato says that what would count as being justice is a very difficult thing to figure out and he goes on to start to define justice and he defines it in terms of the city each piece of the city has something it's supposed to do there's a group I won't go into all the details here but this group of groups of people that are better at doing certain things than others these auxiliaries are our military defenders that keep the city safe the craftspeople are the people that build this stuff that we want to have in our city and then there's this other group called the Guardians these are the wisest of the auxiliaries of those that we've put in armaments they get to the get that status of being in possession of the arms only because they've earned their way through a strenuous education that works them through questions of Justice the ones that are the best at that education at the age of 50 get a chance to be guardians of the city and it's only after a rigorous system of education that works on centers on the question of Justice that we figure out who's gonna who's gonna run us so the ideal City were told and that gives us a sense of understanding justice itself is when each of these groups does what they're supposed to do and when each of these groups follows what's best for them for the Guardians the best thing for them that best virtue they can achieve is to be wise for the auxiliaries the best word you they can achieve is to be courageous and for the craftspeople the best virtue they can achieve is to be temperate tempered now the wisdom that the guardians are gonna have is the particular wisdom of ruling well this is something that I've spent a little bit more time talking about ruling well it's not being a carpenter it's not being a bronze worker it's not being a shoe maker it's not being a maker of any particular thing it's it's a maker of a just society and that's a special kind of skill to specialize the auxiliaries are going to follow their courage by engaging in correct kind of having a correct and lawful belief on what it is what we should fear and what we should not fear crass people the temperance and that means self mastery of certain sorts of pleasures and appetites play there was no fan of bodily pleasures the bodily pleasures only get in your way and never help you achieve now justice is a mix of all of these it's justice emerges from each group pursuing its particular virtue so as long as this group keeps focusing on temperance we're okay if this group starts focusing on courage or wisdom we're in trouble if this group starts focusing on temperance instead of her tourism we're in trouble each group needs to do what it's supposed to do and that's going to make the most justice city see if you all have any questions on that it's a little bit more to say but I got to move along quickly if we've got to I want to spend a little time with Aristotle before we close up okay Aristotle his dates are 384 to 322 BCE the text that I'm mostly referring to here come from the politics of the Nicomachean ethics Aristotle was Plato's student and you know how different their philosophies are you can just imagine the Aristotle sitting with vehement disagreements and probably being one of those people that says well no Socrates it doesn't seem you know and always getting shut down and just waiting for the day when he could write his own philosophy which thank goodness and has sometimes contrasting things to say from Plato and that's true in the case of the city as well Aristotle is mostly interested in sort of Honk's of the world and the honks of the world that Aristotle is interested in are the ones that he sees as organic holes these are the pieces of the world that cohere and stay together that for him is the most other philosophers might try to look for some primary material out of which everything's made that's self-interest to some people plato was very interested in these moral question the questions of justice Aristotle was really interested in describing how things behave and why they do what they do well let me just start off with an experiment for you okay so I've got this piece of reality all right okay okay I know for sure that this piece of a material world wants to be with the rest of the material world which is under our feet the earth now we say to ourselves Aristotle says that inert matter nonliving matter what does it want to do B clumps he wants to clump with other nonliving matter all right now I say to myself okay fine but you think about it I mean we talk about gravity gravity is the principle by which matter clumps it's a description of something that Aristotle was describing in his own way of talking about it as well for Aristotle it's much more sensible to talk about rather than talk about some abstraction with gravity it's much more sensible to talk about the kind of behavior that's built in to the different parts of the world around us this there's behavior built into this thing the keys or the block or the stone or whatever I have in here inanimate matter its behavior is to want to clump with other matter more complex things have other things that they want to do give you another example here see if I can get I want to come back to this okay so here's my dog blue and you could say so what does a dog want to do right right now those of you who have dogs might say well wait a min the dog short that's not me my dog does this but she does this when she doesn't have available to her the thing she really wants to do which is this she wants to be in a forest chasing after little creatures she wants to try to hunt down and kill birds and little furry mammals in the fourth that's what she wants to do she is built to do that that's thriving for Aristotle that is something being what it's supposed to be it's like the keys joining the rest of the earth the different parts of the world around us that we see have behaviors built into them this one she's very gentle and she's really funny she's very nice though but the world around us has in ways that behaves how do human beings behave here's let's just start off with this Aristotle tells us it follows that the state belongs to the class of objects which exists by nature and the human and that a human being is by nature a political animal now some folks I mean you watch MSNBC and you know Joe Scarborough loves to reference that and what is he mean by it well he means we can't wait to get into the back-and-forth of contentious argumentation based on public policy that's I think that's what they think Aristotle meant well you and I both know that's not what Aristotle meant at all the Greek down here focuses in on this politic calm so on this is a that's the political well that looks a lot like a word you all know the city so I think that probably a better translation of a human being is by nature a political animal because the human being is by nature a city animal we're City creatures we by nature clump together and when we clump together Aristotle says the natural clumping group that's perfect for us that's not too big not too small is the city the clans a little too small the group of clans in the Ennis in a small village is too small the city it's just the right size it's the natural place that a human being belongs I grew up in Michigan in a place where we wasn't near a city and I always knew that this was right getting to Philadelphia Ives okay I get it I get it so Aristotle says we have things that we tend to do for us for human beings living in cities is what we do we clump and this clumping is natural to us a couple things of note is natural to us so form this cultural thing most of us will talk about cities as being affirmation of culture right this is just cold that's what that's what humans do is have cultures and we would put a strong divide between nature and culture Aristotle lived in a time also when there was a strong divide between nature and culture in fact we inherit this distinction from the Greeks from the Greeks that they're in ourselves with so he's being provocative I think when he's saying that this great cultural formation of the city emerges from us and naturally but that's straightforwardly what he says so we have in us by nature a form that many of us would think of as being mostly culture now Aristotle has further kinds of I'll just do a final piece here explanation in order to really understand something you've got to look at what causes it and to understand what causes anything you gotta look at four pieces no causation the material formerly efficient and the final give me an example so we have here at the pen Museum there's marvelous neck amphora it's on display now I believe you can see it it and let's take a look at how Aristotle would analyze this thing what's its material formal efficient and final causes once material cause is the clay how does it work as a what it's supposed to be is the thing that it is works because I have this clay material what's the formal cause behind this thing what is the explanation for why it's in the form it is that's the vase shape that's the shape that many potters over time realized was the most efficient way to have wine stored and poured what's the efficient cause what's the Potter that makes the thing talk about where the thing came from in order to really understand it well there's a potter behind it that puts the muscle into making it actually happen but that Potter's not just sort of willy-nilly and pushing clay around the potter is working from a purpose a final purpose the purpose is that the thing needs to hold wine now to understand this vase we've got to understand all these four causes and once we understand those four causes we understand the vase okay now a city for Aristotle we can look at in the same way what's its material formal efficient final causes material humans we human beings are the main material of what a city is made up of then also the resources that we bring to bear to answer the needs that we have what's its formal cause it's the Constitution that's set up the laws that are written down that sheepmen that make it into give it the shape that it has what's its efficient cost its ruler the ruler is required to enact the form of the Constitution in the material of the humans and resources that are there and what's its final cause the city according to Aristotle well the point of a city is not small it's the good life it's human thriving in other words what Aristotle is claiming is that what we want a city to do is to do what my dog does in the woods we want the city to produce an outcome such that human beings are doing their human being thing that they're specifically built by nature to do and for Aristotle it's to pursue moral and intellectual virtue that's what we do that's what makes us distinctive and what makes us different from the other animals some will say that sounds naive people aren't all good that's not what Aristotle saying all of us pursue what we think is moral and intellectual virtue many of us make mistakes what motivates our behavior is what Aristotle is always interested in and what motivates it for him is our desire for the good so we've come a long way from Homer the air of the city was this baying marker of identity and a kind of protective Citadel structure that keeps the enemies at bay could be looked at as a kind of macrocosm of the house of the ruler then in Plato what's the city plans the main mechanism for him to pursue this question of justice and at the end of the story becomes for him the main mechanism will produce injustice the city is the place that makes justice happened for human beings and for Aristotle it is what is most natural to us is to be creatures so look forward to questions and then I'll also afford to after a few minutes of questions going back out into this marvelous city [Applause] we do have a Mike wandering around so we'll do our best to get that to question over here hello Lucas is the basis of the word economy yes and temples were banks okay they have lots of money in them yes you didn't mention much about money and nowadays we think about cities as an engine for making money so how does that apply to these three I answer first of all with the first two of well the two examples Troy in Athens no question the Troy in Athens were what they were because their wealth wealthiest places nearby I mean why did we get democracy and and tragedy and philosophy in Athens I think you've got a safe came because the economy came first so yeah Athens was the wealthiest city of its day Troy was the wealthiest city of its day now what would Homer say to an observation that well we think the city is by definition of wealth creation machine Homer would say yeah probably right okay so no no it wouldn't set I mean it's just straightforward Plato goodness no right you've mixed up the priorities what you're talking about later would say I think is that you're talking about a means as if for an end in itself what you do with your money you enjoy wold you does it seem to you does it produce any happiness does it produce any good in the world well not in and of itself it's a means by which a person is gonna get something done so resources are themselves you know at best he's agnostic on resources and in fact Plato would probably also say more money is deleterious to the pursuit of a truly just life because it tempts you into physical pleasures and physical pleasures are never the way to happiness Aristotle sure yeah you know money there but again it would be a problem of he would I think he would see this as a problem claiming mixing up the causes final cause for a city is not to get more money money is just stuff that that's like a pursuit of a material cause is to have more resources around that's fine but to what end to what point and we don't do things pointlessly human beings don't do things pointlessly and if we miss state what our point is I think to one extent where the Greek thinker is simply describing what they're experiencing in the city and to what extent was an original thought if they've been in some village somewhere would they have come up with the same ideas as opposed to living in an average of the time I don't think so I think that it is reflecting the vibrant atmosphere of classical Athens and there's other specific pieces of what happens was all about I think that people have looked to traditionally to try to explain what's distinctive about happens and it gets to be tricky business it's hard to say exactly what it is but no I think that the ideas that grow out grow out because when Dionysus invited Plato to come to Sicily and be the philosopher king yeah and apply his theories it really didn't work out that work out that's true why do you think that is uh uh you know the mistakes of implementation and the specifics of that historical circumstance we by which I mean the scholarly community has more evidence at its fingertips than I have at my fingertips so I don't want to venture off of the territory that others could answer much better for you but I wouldn't say that again what Plato would be talking about is well there is an ideal what a city is and no iteration of a perfect of a city is going to be perfect but to have the ideal is a necessary prerequisite ever to know whether your city is any good or not so what he was trying to produce the Republic was an ideal city and right it turned out that he was a much better philosopher than he was a city builder well yes I think that from from this ancient evidence cities definitely can become too big for Aristotle there's a natural size to everything and once something gets beyond that natural size it's it's unstable now they would have very little to help us with say whether cultural diversity or you know their cultural variants was some important piece of a city most of them were culturally utterly homogeneous now surely aspects of chauvinism come part and parcel of that cultural homogeneity but I also would say just on in terms of what's in Greek cultural DNA you've also got Homer's Odyssey in which the whole point is to go see the wide world and people that don't get out and see strange ways of doing things different ways of doing things other cultures and don't have a sense of being able to communicate with them they're just they're hopeless they're they're monsters and they're you know only monsters don't know how to sail okay Homer's world so you've got to know how to sail to God and build bridges whether there's some analogy that we can make to our world but no Plato and Aristotle City was very homogeneous and it didn't instill in them any this is back to the city of you know whether the physical circumstances where the setting produces the thought they have very little thoughtfulness when it comes to this question of cultural kinds of complexity cultural differences how might we negotiate between these things that was mostly a non-issue it was a blind spot for them and it was blind spot I think partly because yeah the issue with city design over decades or centuries have you found you know this isn't philosophical it's more practical type of question have you found a lot of commonality obviously were their border ways you can have commerce from that aspect but did you find any commonality over the centuries or different cultures of planning you know it's kind of a general question well I I and then do this again another place where the scholarly community has much more knowledge and its fingertips in the general than I do at my own so it won't be able to give very good but I would say it is expected in Homer and Aristotle's time that the basic shape of the city is the same it's the thing that works well you've got walls not like the Trojan ones but the walls that guard the perimeters you've got a market place where everything happens act economy politics social gathering all happens in the marketplace you've got a political arena that where ideas are exchanged and the nuts and bolts of the law are worked out and then you've got a temple the temple is a place where the Civic religion is is practiced and I use Civic religion not because I think that they had I don't all I mean to say there is it their focus on a divinity was almost always through the lens of a city so Athens is Athens because of Supino's city and her temple is at the top of this of the main Citadel there and she that's where she lives and one participates in the Civic cult because it's good thing to do to be an athenian and to be against you know we all it's something we all agree on and it's been Efes n't and it's mostly so so yeah so there would be that space to and play Donaire style in their own specifics of building out the city all expect those pieces to be there so Aristotle taught Alexander the Great yes do you think he said to him go east young man two more cities I mean what what do you think he said to him about establishing more cities um I don't know I don't know you know that the I think that and this comes back to the money question that Aristotle taught Alexander you that's what the money was Alexander's father had discovered a massive silver mine got control of it and use that and also on the Macedonians these are you know we are Athenians in this room they're not us they're from the north they're a little uncivilized they're near Thrace I mean they're just and also they arrive as if they're and Aristotle sees which way the winds blowing and sidles right up to Alexander now yeah and it it works I mean it you know it's in it's exciting its interest so yeah he does tutor Alexander I don't know you know I would need to know a lot more about Alexander my colleague Jeremy McInerney my department would but I need a lot to see what kind of predisposition does a person have in other words it's we all I mean we all know that there are some impulse to have people around who pursue these kind of esoteric things like philosophy another nice to have them around they're kind of decorative nice to have a dinner parties and they might even also sort of improve your own social status because look you've got one of those you know it's like so it could be that that's what Alexander was expecting out of Aristotle I don't you know I don't know and I think this is another case where I a colleague that would know more about Eric Alexander might have a stronger on this but I guess the better answer cycle speak to the collapse of cities yes and I'll talk to the one after the 1250 BC after the contact in that zone there's a between the time that Homer is writing in in the time he's talking about in that 500 years is a time when these massive joys of the Mediterranean disappear a little too strong a word but they mostly decay and there we have a lack of monumental building a lack of Commerce a lack of exchange alls from about 1100 BCE until about 750 BC and we don't know exactly what happened there's reference to the Sea Peoples whoever they are as potentially groups of marauding piratical kind of pirates that got into these found a way into these massive by sitting in cities and figured out a weak point and just raised them all and once you break what's been built over many centuries you can't just put it back together so the cities the the large Mycenaean cities all fell apart shortly after the Trojan War Troy so it's a strange thing that could happen in that part of the world but the causation is mysterious we don't know for sure why it was and once things started to go south they went really south so you know it's I think the lessons of history are instructive in all kinds of ways and to realize the precious quality of what a person has and it's temporariness is always a salutary lesson particularly in a time in a place that we live in now which would be unthinkable in terms of its possibilities even sure we've time for one more question what and where were the sources of food for cities of that massage that you showed us in that representation of Troy and Athens that we saw mostly the farm was outside the wall now the there would be room for some farming on the inside but it would have been really for emergencies or sieges that were laid and so you know according to the story the Greek army was out parked outside that Trojan City know for you know nine years before the Iliad and ten years altogether and math must have made the gathering the food very difficult now the Trojans taught Homer talks about the choice of trading with their neighbors to somehow get in supplies so the seat wasn't totally but no mostly the farmland was in exposed areas okay thanks [Applause]

Channel: Penn Museum

Views: 14,133

Rating: 4.6599998 out of 5

Keywords: Peter Struck, Classical studies, Greece, greek, Lectures, Aristotle, philosophers, city

Id: sKFso4RTm1Q

Length: 63min 7sec (3787 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2017

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Dr. Peter Struck, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. For 2017-2018, the Penn Museum’s popular monthly Great Lectures Series, first Wednesday evenings October through June, focuses on the Rise of the City. Peter Struck, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, kicks off the new series with a Classical focus. Aristotle famously called humans “political animals.” But by that he meant that humans are pack animals, they by nature live in clumps, and their natural clump size, he claimed, is the city, or the Greek polis. This talk examines Greek ideas about the polis, from philosophers, poets, and historians, from the archaic and classical periods. Dr. Struck examines the idea that we are by nature city creatures, and that no other mode of living fits humans so naturally as urban life.