Thought Itself

Who Were The Greeks?

The mythology and history of ancient Greece, like that of other ancient cultures such as the Indians and the Mayans, was recorded in poetry and song.  As mentioned last time, it was only with Alexander and his brief empire that the city states of ancient Greece were united as a single state, though they shared a common language and tradition for centuries before.  The two largest ethnic groups were the Ionians (of the Turkish eastern half of ancient Greece) and the Dorians (of the western half, what is today the modern European nation of Greece).  There was a genealogical myth shared by these and other groups of a King Helen who had three sons (Aiolos, Doros & Xouthos) whose descendants became the tribes of interrelated but distinct ancient Greeks.  This is very similar to the Old Testament narrative of Noah, whose three sons repopulated the world after the great flood.  Both stories explain the diversity of human ethnicities and cultures by way of a single family of origin.

As a side note, Nazi historians along with other Europeans theorized that a Germanic invasion of the Dorian lands was the ethnic spark that gave birth to Athens and the West, giving European civilization a Germanic Western European origin, the so-called ‘Dorian Invasion’ theory.

While Alexander was the first to bring the city states together as one political entity, much of ancient Greece was brought together with a common purpose during the fifty years of the Greco-Persian War (499  – 449 BCE), just as ancient Greece was beginning to rise and a hundred years before Alexander’s empire.  Cyrus, emperor of Persia mentioned last time, conquered Ionia in 547 BCE, but the Ionians revolted fifty years later with support from the Dorians and others.

The center of the rebellion was Miletus, near the modern day Turkish city of Anatolia, the home of the first Greek philosophers (Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, known as the Milesian School).  Darius, son of Cyrus and heir to the Persian Empire, sought to secure Ionia and then attack Athens and other city states that supported the Ionian rebellion.  In 490 BCE, the Persians were defeated at the battle of Marathon.  While Darius’ son Xerxes succeeded in overrunning all of Greece ten years later, the Persians were eventually expelled and the city states formed the Delian League with Athens as a leading member.  After Ionia was freed from Persian rule, a treaty between Athens and Persia brought an end to the wars.  It was at this time that Athens rose to wealth and power, and it had it’s period of great thinkers at home and traveling in from abroad.

Herodotus, who grew up during this period, noted that the Persians did not build statues of gods when they conquered a place, as they did not have anthropomorphic gods.  Last time it was mentioned that Persian Zoroastrian monotheism was influential on the ancient Greek philosophers, pushing them to abstract beyond their common tradition of polytheistic gods.  In another parallel with Islam, European Protestant Christianity was influenced by Islamic art in the centuries following the crusades.  As Muslim armies made inroads into Europe, the Europeans wondered why Islam was so successful.  Turning to the Bible, reading that God uses foreign enemies to punish his people for doing wrong, and he punished the Israelites for worshiping idols as images, the Iconoclasts of Europe (the origin of the term, which today denotes those who go against the ways of things) ditched the statues of saints and other icons to be more like the successful Muslims who avoided images of saints and preferred to represent God and the order of nature through abstract geometric patterns.  These Iconoclasts paved the way for the Protestant reformation.  In both ancient Greece and medieval Europe, we see an imitation of an intimidating enemy that results in abstraction, seeking truth in a form deeper than immediate appearances.

Freedom and Ancient Greece

Much has been made of Greek freedom.  The freedom of the ancient Greeks is often celebrated as the origin of Greek philosophy and the distinct culture of ‘The West’.  The theory is that the ancient Greeks were a culture that appreciated freedom, which led Greek philosophers to be independently individual in their free reasoning, which created a culture that was distinct from the rest of the ancient world in terms of freedom and reason, which led to later European distinction in science and philosophy.  As the Greeks repelled the Persians, at the time they were rising in power and wealth, much was said and written about the Greeks sharing a sense of freedom and autonomy.

This was not freedom for individuality, but political freedom of the city states, both from Persia and from each other.  Socrates was killed in Athens for leading the youth astray from the traditional understanding of the gods.  There are similar parallels with struggles in later Europe and the American Revolution.  In the movie Braveheart, when William Wallace (played by a blue-painted Mel Gibson) famously yells, “They will take our lives, but they will never take OUR FREEDOM!”, he does not mean individual rights and liberties, but rather that the common people should be owned and controlled by the local Scottish noble lords, and not the noble lords of England.

During the American Revolution, the colonies wanted freedom from Britain and each other, but they did not want freedom for their slaves any more than the ancient Greeks did.  The Bill of Rights originally did not grant freedom of speech, religion or gun ownership to individual citizens, but prevented the federal government from limiting the state’s rights to limit their own individual citizens.  Several states had particular denominations of Protestant Christianity as their official state religions, because the federal government could not limit their ability to practice a collective religious freedom that limited individual religious freedom.  One British lawmaker wrote a rebuttal to the Declaration of Independence, arguing that the American slave-masters had no right to speak of appreciating liberty or standing for freedom.  British spies circulated rumors among slave plantations that the British would free the slaves if the slaves revolted and sided with the British against the revolution, which was likely mere propaganda rather than a sincere political promise.

Today American conservatives argue that limiting the freedom of religious groups and business interests is anti-freedom and therefore un-American, while progressives argue that religious groups should not have the freedom of state-sanctioned proselytizing, and corporations should not have the freedom to change laws and precedents, as both limit the freedom of individuals to challenge their dominance.  If a teacher has the freedom to lead a classroom in prayer, this limits the freedom of individuals who wish to pray differently or not pray at all.  If a corporation has the freedom to change laws or affect which laws are enforced, this limits the freedom of individuals who are harmed or seek to prevent harm by that corporation.

In sum, while the ancient Greeks did appreciate a particular freedom from Persia, what was freedom for some was slavery for others.  If I have the freedom to eat as much of a cake as I want, this prevents anyone else from having any cake and thus this same freedom to have cake.  As Heraclitus argues, what is good for one can be bad for another, such as salt water being poisonous to us but drinkable for fish.  Considering that the freedom of first-world consumerism is bought at the price of third-world indentured servitude (the debt and control not by accident but by design), the freedom of ‘The West’ is its opposite for others.

The Ancient Greek Poets & Epics

The two poets Homer and Hesiod, both of whom are thought to have lived and composed the great Greek epics about 700 BCE, are two of the central sources from which the ancient Greeks drew a common cultural tradition.  Homer is said by most ancient sources to have been Ionian but by some to have been Babylonian.  He is the great original Greek poet/historian, followed by Hesiod who many consider to be an inferior imitator.  Homer wrote the Iliad, the story of Achilles and the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus or Ulysses’ ten year quest to sail home from the Trojan War.

Myths are not monolithic, but subject to various telling and interpretation.  Homer and Hesiod both brought together the various mythologies of ancient Greece and through the medium of poetry and song created new consolidated versions that became the central common cultural standards, institutionalized and ritualized.  This is a typical pattern found accross human cultures, found also in the great Indian epics (the Ramayana and Mahabharata) as well as the Old and New testaments of the Bible.  Modern scholarship finds discrepancies between various parts of these central traditional texts and theorizes about the various versions and why they differ.

Homer’s Iliad takes place during the Trojan War, which famously began after Paris kidnaps Helen and takes her to Troy, prompting a war with the Greek alliance.  The Iliad begins as the Greek King Agamemnon refuses to return the daughter of a Trojan priest of Apollo he has captured as a slave.  In response to Agamemnon’s refusal, Apollo responds with a plague.  Apollo, who was originally a local god of shepherds and musicians, had become the Greek god of light, the sun, truth and music.  Apollo’s son, Asclepius, became the god of mystical knowledge and wisdom.  When Socrates dies, in Plato’s account the last thing Socrates says is that he owes a rooster to Asclepius, apparently wishing to perform an animal sacrifice as a thanks for the gift of wisdom which sees beyond life and death.

Odysseus, the protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey, brings the priest’s daughter back to Troy, prompting a disagreement between Achilles and Agamemnon.  Achilles, refusing to fight, allows the Trojans gain the upper hand, prompting the great Greek gods to interfere with the conflict on all sides, themselves in conflict over the outcome.  Later in this course, we will find that Heraclitus and other philosophers criticize both Homer and Hesiod for presenting the gods as bloodthirsty and irrational beings, arguing that the gods must be far better than humans and would not get involved in partisan conflicts.

Hesiod’s Theogony gives an account of the origin of the world and the gods, bringing together various myths and versions to create an orthodox account.  The text has eastern influences from earlier Babylonian and Assyrian mythology and cosmology.  As Hesiod explains, gods are born but they do not die, or if they die they are reborn and live in spite of death.  The gods can take many forms, such as animals or particular human individuals, but have a true form which is anthropomorphic.  While we use the world ‘epiphany’ to mean any sort of revelation today, it originally signified a god revealing himself or herself to a mortal in their true anthropomorphic form.

Hesiod’s cosmology sets a standard picture of the world followed by the first Milesian philosophers (Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes), but Hesiod concentrates on the pantheon of gods while the philosophers concentrate on the order of the elements such as fire, air and water.  Hesiod’s account of creation unfolds in stages, likely inspired by a series of empires conquering and reconquering the same land.  First, Chaos gives birth to Darkness and Night, and from these come Aether (bright upper air, supposed to be a separate element by the ancient Greeks, Buddhists and Isaac Newton) and Day.

Ouranos (also Uranus), god of the sky, gets it on with Gaia, mother goddess of the earth, producing the Titans.  The head titan, Kronos, god of time, castrates Ouranos and assumes his place as king father god.  On new years day, European cultures present the ending year as an old man in a toga with a scythe, a caricature of Kronos and his snippy personality.  Kronos then has children with the titan Rhea, but eats them as soon as they are born, all except Zeus who escapes with the help of Rhea and Gaia.  Zeus produces the other Olympic gods as his children in a multitude of ways.  Athena, goddess of wisdom, spontaneously bursts from Zeus’ forehead after a headache.  The Olympic gods defeat the Titans and assume control of the cosmos with Zeus as their king(power, wisdom, and justice personified) on the advice of their compassionate grandmother, Gaia.

Poetry was not only publicly performed epic.  At symposiums, meetings of all men or all women would gather to hear poetry sung over the stringed lyre.  Lyric could be sung solo or by a choir, just like the chorus of tragedies.  Choral performances of poetry featured various instruments and choreographed dance.  Songs were not just for entertainment, but for tying groups together through celebrations of heroic feats and tragic defeats.  Loyal heroes and friends were praised, enemies and traitors mocked.  In one archaic poem of Archilochos, a friend who betrayed the poet is cursed: hope of shipwreck, washes up naked on enemy shore and be condemned to slavery.

Archilochos is the first major archaic poet, but the most famous is the Lesbian Sappho.  First, some wisdom quotes from Archilochos which sound very similar to quotes from Egyptian wisdom we study in other classes, as well as to the fragments of Heraclitus we will study soon::

Don’t exalt openly in victory, nor in defeat collapse at home and weep, but do not rejoice in joys or be sore at evils much.  Recognize what rhythm holds men.

Attribute all to the gods.  Often they raise up out of evils men who lie on the dark earth, but often they knock flat on their backs those who walk tall.

The fox knows many things, the hedgehog, one big thing.

(This is similar to the Daoist parable of the frog in the well, illustrating that our reality is that with which we are most familiar.)

Pain strikes one, then another.  Now it turns to us and we groan over a bloody wound.  Next it will turn to someone else.  So now endure, driving back womanly grief.

This last line shows us how remarkable it is that Sappho of Lesbos succeeded in becoming the most famous of the nine preserved archaic Greek poets.  Unlike other poets, Sappho did not write passively, but actively as an ‘I’, putting herself in the picture.  Sappho’s poetry was preserved along with the other eight archaic poets at Alexandria, Egypt, where they were copied by scholars onto papyrus.  Her poems are said to have been burned in pre-Renaissance Europe for their subversive nature, but this is in dispute.

Sappho is history’s most famous lesbian, and because her poetry speaks erotically of other women, it is due to her that, while the men of Lesbos were as much Lesbians as Sappho was, the female homosexual community bears this as its name.  While Sappho’s poetry and others seems homoerotic, attraction is expressed but not overt sexuality.  Men praising men as desirable and women praising women as desirable was an acceptable genre as a toast at a wedding.  Modern scholars argue whether or not Sappho and other Greek poets are simply giving “my friend is a real catch” wedding toasts or whether they are using the accepted genre as a barely concealed cover.

Sappho seems to have a treasured circle of young women as her admirers and aspiring disciples, some of whom she laments she has lost to other attractive poets, her competition.  Lesbian relationships are thought to have been common among women of Lesbos and Sparta.  While young men were presumed to have erotic relationships with older men in a mentor relationship, adult men were not supposed to have sexual relationships with each other.  Thus, the mentorship is mediated by sex just as the history is mediated by poetry and song.

Sappho’s most famous passage reads:

Some say an army of horsemen, others say foot-soldiers, still others, a fleet, is the fairest thing on the dark earth.  I say it is whatever one loves…

I would rather see her lovely step and the radiant sparkle of her face than all the war-chariots in Lydia and soldiers battling in shiny bronze.

Notice that Sappho is appealing to a culture of mercenaries and warriors.  Her perspectivism, the idea that truth is in the eye of the beholder, will be paralleled by Xenophanes, Heraclitus and others.  In other poems, Sappho uses Helen of Troy as an example of desire eclipsing all else.

Tragedy and Paradox

Tragedy allows the audience to remove themselves from while simultaneously identify with the paradoxes and contradictions of life.  Like the polytheistic gods themselves, who do not behave ideally but as powerful yet fallible individuals, tragedies show the audience the most powerful and famous in the worst of downfalls, much like tabloid journalism today.

One of the themes of Greek tragedy is hamartia, the fatal flaw.  Paradoxically, the greatest strength of the protagonist that allows them to rise is also their greatest fault which brings about their downfall.  One primary example is from Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which retells the story of Agamemnon found in Homer’s Iliad.  Agamemnon is proud and strong, which is what allows him to be successful as a military commander but causes him to fall because he is too proud to compromise, a necessary skill for political leadership along with courage.

Another example is Antigone from the Sophocles play by the same name.  Antigone has two brothers who fight over the title of King of Thebes.  After both slay each other, Creon takes the throne and declares that one brother is to be honored as a hero but the other is to be refused burial and left to decay on the battlefield.  Antigone, drawn between obeying the dictates of the state and the honor of her family, defies the new king and tries to bury her brother and is condemned to death in court.  Antigone is loyal, but she must make a choice: Which is the greater loyalty, family or state?  Either way, loyalty to someone is disloyalty to someone else, just as freedom for someone is limitation for someone else.

Antigone was written before Oedipus Rex, but it is the third of three plays in a trilogy, which Oedipus Rex begins.

Oedipus: It’s Complicated

Oedipus has quite a reputation as the most famous mother-lover in all history, the one Freud used to name one of his famous theories about the human mind, sex and violence, the Oedipus complex.  My grandfather was a psychoanalyst who moved into Gestalt theory as psychoanalysis began to lose credibility on the West Coast in the 60s and 70s, as the therapist side of psychology moved from Freud and asking you how you feel about your mother to any number of theories and asking you how you feel, whether or not your mother is involved.  I am similarly interested in understanding gender and sexuality, but post-Freudian, so I’m critical of Freud’s claims, as well as underlying Jungian archetypes, but the story and later analysts can tell us many interesting things about gender and power in human culture.

Queen Jocasta and King Laius of Thebes try and fail to have children, so Laius consults the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, the oracle that hundreds of years later says no one is wiser than Socrates, prompting Socrates to wander around annoying everyone continuously until they killed him.  The oracle says if Laius has a son his son will kill him. A proud king, symbol of order and violence, will be killed by the next in line, a new order and authority violently replacing the old. Some say the play is about unavoidable fate, that choices do not matter, but the choices of Laius, Jocasta and Oedipus bring about their ends, as many early critics failed to see but many now point out.

They clearly keep trying, and Jocasta bears him a son, so Laius gives the baby to a servant to have the child exposed and killed.  Laius does not kill the child himself, but hands the task off to someone else, who hands it off to a shepherd, as the servant, like the king, and now the shepherd, does not want the baby’s blood on his hands, even if all three have chosen to take on the responsibility of the child.  Laius also pierces the babies feet or legs, presumably to keep the baby from crawling away from its fate, but doesn’t kill the child. He could kill the child himself, but instead he wounds it and passes it on. The Greek word pus of Oedipus is used to mean foot or leg, and when the baby is handed off in Corinth to the king and queen there, they call him Swollen Foot/Feet/Leg/Legs, or Oedipus.  Freud thought that Oedipus’ swollen leg was something else entirely, and Oedipus fears castration and impotency inflicted on him by the father, who stands between the child and the mother, dividing the mother’s love.

The king and queen of Corinth raise him as their son, and Oedipus grows into a young man and suspects he is adopted, so he consults the oracle at Delphi, and it tells him, as it did his real father Laius, that he will kill his father and also that he will marry his mother.  Thinking the oracle is speaking of his adopted parents, Oedipus decides not to go home, but to nearby Thebes, where he was born, which is still unknown to him. On the road he meets his father Laius, they fight over who gets to go first, and when Laius tries to run Oedipus over with his royal chariot Oedipus kills him.  Laius’ pride and aggression send the child away, and then when the child returns Laius’ aggression towards his son leads his son, who is a warrior like Laius, to kill him.

Oedipus then meets the Sphinx, who has been plaguing Thebes with a fatal riddle:  What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon and three at night? Those who can’t answer the question are killed, presumably everyone who has tried to get to Thebes since the Sphinx set up shop.  The tragedy is that Oedipus is smart enough to guess that the answer is humanity, who crawl as a baby, walk as an adult and walk with a cane as elderly, but he does not see his own larger situation, unfolding over time through the course of his life, such that he has already fulfilled one part of the prophecy, and is on his way to unknowingly know his mother too well, as she has promised her hand to the man who defeats the riddling Sphinx.  Oedipus marries his mother and takes his father’s place as king of Thebes.

Jocasta marries to use her position to rid the town of the Sphinx, which leaves her open to accepting a man who is not her former husband, just as Penelope does in the Odyssey.  Penelope has many suitors who beat down her door as Odysseus spends years on his Odyssey home, and she finally breaks down and says she will marry whomever can shoot an arrow through ten ax handles, which is what the unrecognizable Odysseus does when he returns to win his bride back, much like Robin Hood wins the archery contest in disguise to win Maid Marian.  Like violence, sex is used to broker power, and it leads to resolution in the Odyssey, but tragedy for Oedipus and family.

Years later a plague strikes the land, and the oracle says that Laius’ murderer has not been brought to justice, so Oedipus vows to right the wrong he did himself, and curses the uncaught murderer with exile.  The blind prophet Tiresias is brought in, who realizes what is happening, seeing what can’t be seen by those with eyes, who see what is on the surface, so he tells Oedipus to drop his investigation. Tiresias was turned into a snake by Hera for killing snakes, and then he is blinded by Hera after she and her husband Zeus get in an argument over who enjoys sex more, men or women, and ask Tiresias, who has been both and mothered children.  Tiresias says that women get nine times more pleasure out of sex than men do, which wasn’t what Hera wanted to hear, so she takes his sight, and Zeus, not all powerful or able to undo what Hera did, does something else and gives Tiresias wisdom, longevity and sharp ears, such that some said Tiresias invented augury, reading the future from birds, as one does at a Roman inauguration, when an official is placed in office and birds are released to predict the official fortune.

Oedipus, furious at Tiresias for avoiding his questions, accuses Tiresias of being involved with Laius’ death, and so Tiresias, furious, tells Oedipus what he wanted to remain silent about to prevent more harm, that it is Oedipus who killed Laius himself.  Jocasta, figuring out what is happening, also begs Oedipus to drop it, but this makes him suspect that he is shamefully adopted, so he has to learn the truth and keep up the investigation. In Sophocles’ ending, which is his alone, Oedipus discovers the truth, finds his mother has committed suicide, so he blinds and exiles himself, with his daughter Antigone leading him blindly out of town.

There is no archaeological dig that has found evidence Oedipus was a king in Thebes or anywhere else in ancient Greece.  The first time he is referred to is in Homer’s Odyssey, but this suggests he was the subject of earlier stories that the epics build on.  Some have claimed that Greek myths such as Oedipus tell us about nature more than history, and the Sun, like Oedipus, appears to be born from the earth, conquers the darkness of the sky that fathers it as it travels on a journey, lie with it’s mother in the end at night, and go blind and dark.

There are some who argue that the Sphinx and city Thebes suggest an Egyptian origin for Oedipus.  The most famous sphinx guards the pyramids at Giza, with the body of a lion and the head of a pharaoh.  Modern archaeology suggests that the sphinx originally had the head of a lion as well, but then it was carved into the head of the pharaoh later.  The statue would have impressed ancient Greek travelers to Egypt, of which there were many. While Oedipus’ sphinx is evil, they are guardians in Egypt, and outside the ancient Egyptian capital city of Thebes, which is not the same Thebes of Greece, but the capital of Upper Egypt and all of Egypt during the 18th dynasty, there is a large statue of Hathor, the lion goddess, facing west, the setting sun, death and eternity.