Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times / Edition 2 available in Paperback
Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times / Edition 2
- ISBN-10:
- 0300160054
- ISBN-13:
- 9780300160055
- Pub. Date:
- 04/16/2013
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0300160054
- ISBN-13:
- 9780300160055
- Pub. Date:
- 04/16/2013
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times / Edition 2
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Overview
“A limpidly written, highly accessible, and comprehensive history of Greece and its civilizations from prehistory through the collapse of Alexander the Great’s empire. . . . A highly readable account of ancient Greece, particularly useful as an introductory or review text for the student or the general reader.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A polished and informative work that will be useful for general readers and students.”—Daniel Tompkins, Temple University
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300160055 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2013 |
| Edition description: | Second Edition |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Sales rank: | 428,911 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ancient Greece
From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times
By Thomas R. Martin
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-16005-5
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
"Most things in the history of Greece have become a subject of dispute" is how Pausanias, the second-century A.D. author of a famous guide to sites throughout Greece, summed up the challenge and the fascination of thinking about the significance of ancient Greek history (Guide to Greece 4.2.3). The subject was disputed then because Pausanias, a Greek, lived and wrote under the Roman Empire, when Greeks as subjects of the emperor in Rome no longer enjoyed the independence on which they once had prided themselves and had fought fiercely to protect. One dispute he focused on was why Greeks had lost their liberty and what it meant to live as the descendants of more-glorious ancestors. Today, the study of ancient Greek history still remains filled with disputes over how to evaluate the accomplishments and the failures that its story so dramatically presents. On the one hand, the accomplishments of the Greeks in innovative political organization, including democracy, history writing, literature, drama, philosophy, art, and architecture, deserve the description that the fifth-century B.C. historian Herodotus used to explain why he included the events and people that he did in his groundbreaking work: They were "wonders." On the other hand, the shortcomings of the ancient Greeks, including their perpetuation of slavery, the exclusion of women from politics, and their failure to unite to preserve their independence, seem equally striking and strongly disturbing. For me, after nearly forty years of studying, teaching, and writing about ancient Greece, the subject in all its diversity remains fascinating—and often perplexing—because it is awe inspiring. Awe, a word in English derived from the ancient Greek noun achos, meaning "mental or physical pain," can, of course, have two opposite meanings: "wonder and approval" or "dread and rejection." I have both those reactions when thinking about ancient Greece and the disputes that its history continues to stimulate.
Ancient Greece is a vast subject, and this overview, written to be a concise introduction, necessarily compresses and even omits topics that others would emphasize. Whenever possible it tries to signal to readers when interesting disputes lie behind the presentation and interpretation of events or persons, but it cannot offer anything like a full treatment and still achieve the goal of brevity. My hope is that readers will be inspired, or at least provoked, to investigate the evidence for themselves, starting with the ancient sources. For this reason, those sources will be cited in the text from time to time to give a glimpse of the knowledge and delight to be gained from studying them. An extensive list of English translations of those sources is provided in the Suggested Readings, along with modern scholarly works that present fuller accounts and sometimes dueling interpretations of important topics, especially those that give rise to dispute.
The narrative of the overview covers the period from prehistory (so called because no written records exist to document those times) to the Hellenistic Age (the modern term for the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.). Geographically, it covers, as much as space allows in a book meant to be very brief, the locations in and around the Mediterranean Sea where Greeks lived. The majority of the narrative concerns the Archaic and Classical Ages (the modern terms for the spans of time from 750 to 500 and 500 to 323 B.C., respectively) and the settlements in the territory of mainland Greece, especially Athens. This coverage admittedly reflects a traditional emphasis on what remain the most famous events, personalities, writings, art, and architecture of ancient Greece. It also reflects the inescapable fact that the surviving ancient sources for this four-hundred-year span are more copious and have been studied in greater depth by scholars than the sources for the earlier and later spans of Greek history, although that imbalance is being reduced by discoveries and modern scholarly work. Finally, that this book focuses above all on the Classical Age reflects my interest in the awe-inspiring (in both positive and negative senses) deeds and thoughts of Greeks over those few centuries.
Relatively small in population, endowed with only a limited amount of flat and fertile agricultural land, and never united as a single nation, ancient Greece eagerly adopted and adapted many ideas and technologies from its more-numerous, prosperous, and less-factional neighbors in the Near East (the southwestern edge of Asia at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea). Building on these inspirations from others, Greeks incubated their own ideas and practices, some of which still resonate today, thousands of years later. It is also true that ancient Greeks, like other ancient peoples, believed and did things that many people today would regard as "awesome" in the sense of morally repugnant. In this context, I agree with those who regard the past as a conceptual "foreign country" largely populated by people who can seem strikingly "other" from what most people today believe, or at least proclaim that they believe, about what sort of persons they are and what moral standards they live by. I also think that admirers of modernity sometimes express a supercilious moral superiority in their judgments regarding antiquity, which recent history scarcely merits. In any case, writing history inevitably involves rendering judgments, if only in what the historian chooses to include and exclude, and I hope that my skepticism about the assertion that the present is far "better" than the past will not seem inconsistent or hypocritical when I occasionally offer critical evaluations in this history. These judgments are made with a deep sense of humility and a keen awareness of how they certainly may miss the mark. Those are the sentiments, along with awe, that studying ancient history constantly renews in me.
The Greek achievements that strike me as the most impressive, and the failures that seem the saddest, took place beginning in the eighth century B.C., when Greece gradually began to recover from its Dark Age—the centuries of economic devastation, population decline, and political vacuum from about 1000 to 750 B.C. Earlier, in the Bronze Age of the second millennium B.C., life had been stable and, relatively speaking, prosperous throughout Greece in tightly organized, independent communities ruled by powerful families through "top-down" political, social, and economic institutions. Spurred by growing trade and cultural interaction with especially the peoples in the lands bordering the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, Greeks slowly rebuilt their civilization, but in doing so they diverged both from their previous ways of life and also from those of everyone else in their world: Organizing themselves into city-states, they almost universally rejected the rule of royalty as the "default value" for structuring human society and politics. For them, the new normal became widespread participation in decision making by male citizens who earned that privilege by helping to defend the community. Most astonishing of all, some Greeks implemented this principle by establishing democracies, the first the world had ever seen (some scholars see roots of democracy in earlier communities in the eastern Mediterranean, but the evidence is unconvincing because, for one thing, it shows no concept of citizenship). At Athens, the guiding principle of democratic government became "equality before the law" and "equality of speech," regardless of a male citizen's wealth, birth, or social status. These concepts of equality represented a radical departure from the usual expectations and norms of politics in the ancient world.
It is necessary to emphasize that Greeks stopped short of fully putting the principle of participation into practice: They did not extend it to female citizens or slaves. As their literature dramatically reveals, they were clearly aware of logical arguments refuting the assertions that women and the enslaved of both genders were by nature characterized by cognitive inferiority and ethical deficiencies, rendering them incapable of participating in the community alongside men. This failure to accept and live by the full implications of their reasoning about politics and law seems to me an inescapable demerit to ancient Greek society. As the nineteenth-century English historian known as Lord Acton remarked in commenting on the ruthless actions of popes and kings, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Historical Essays and Studies, p. 504). Men held the majority of power in ancient Greece, and it corrupted them, as it eventually does everyone in every era who exercises it.
That ancient Greeks recognized the existence of ideas contradicting their practices is not as surprising as it might seem, because their philosophers, scientists, and literary authors displayed relentless insight in conducting what we might call "thought experiments" on the nature of the world and of human beings. The Greeks' expressions of their ideas in poetry, prose, and drama are deservedly famous for their brilliance—and their sometimes troubling implications. Other ancient civilizations, from the Near East to India to China, also developed impressively insightful scientific and philosophic theories, and the Greeks certainly belong to the first rank of this distinguished company. The same evaluation is justified for Greek literature, drama, history writing, art, and architecture. It is more difficult to evaluate ancient Greek values and practices concerning those two most controversial areas of human experience and belief— religion and sex. As will become clear from the discussions of those topics later in this book, significant differences exist between ancient Greek religious and sexual traditions and what the majority of people today believe and do.
For all these reasons, and more that form part of the narrative to follow, the history of ancient Greece offers fascinating insights into the possibilities and limitations of human existence and presents numerous opportunities for discovery and reflection about the past and the present; not only is it intrinsically interesting (it seems to me), it is also good to think with, as the renowned French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said in interpreting why human beings have identified animal species as totems, meaning legendary ancestors whose characteristics their descendants were thought to have inherited and needed to keep in mind in defining their lives (Totemism, p. 89).
SOURCES AND EVIDENCE
The best way to learn about ancient Greek history and form one's own judgments is to study the ancient evidence first and then follow up on particular topics by consulting specialized works of modern scholarship. It is conventional to refer to ancient literature, inscriptions, documents written on papyrus, coins, and archaeological remains as "primary" sources, even when they were not contemporary with the history to which they refer. In fact, sources that scholars treat as primary can be considerably later in date than the events or persons for which they provide evidence, such as the inscription from Cyrene cited in the discussion of the founding of colonies in chapter 4. Other primary sources, such as fifth-century B.C. inscriptions about the finances of the so-called Athenian Empire (fig. 1.1), provide direct evidence about history at the time when they were produced. In any case, the surviving ancient sources are the first place to which we should turn to try to understand the past, and in that sense they are always primary. They can be hard to understand. Ancient documents were written for people who knew the full context to which they applied, not for us, who do not. Authors of literary works, including historians, were not aiming to present neutral, objective accounts of events and persons. Rather, they wanted to support a particular view of things and persuade their audiences to accept their interpretations of events and people's motives. Of course, modern writers often take this same approach, too, but those of us studying ancient Greece today must always stay on the lookout not only for what the ancient source was saying but why it was saying that.
The works of modern scholars are usually referred to as "secondary" sources, even when they prove essential in understanding, or even in correcting, the evidence derived from the primary sources. To try to help readers in consulting ancient sources, the citations to them in this overview will use, whenever possible, the internal reference systems that allow a passage to be located regardless of the translation being used (if that translation includes the reference system, which not all do, unfortunately). So, for example, a citation of Herodotus, The Histories 7.205, cited as evidence for the three hundred Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., means the passage is in book 7, section 205. (For poems, citations are to line numbers, preceded, if needed, by book number.) For secondary sources, the citations are to page numbers or catalogue item numbers.
The majority of the literary and documentary texts from Greek antiquity have not survived, but those that have are significant and provocative. The epics of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, represent the most primary of the surviving primary sources from literature for the history of ancient Greece, for the Greeks then and for us today. Scholars debate how these long poems reached the form in which they have survived to this day. Some argue that they emerged from centuries and centuries of fluid and flexible oral performances by many bards, finally put down in a written version in the Archaic Age. Others believe that a single poet created the poems using the technology of writing in the eighth century B.C. However they came into existence, the stories in The Iliad and The Odyssey looked back to the Bronze Age while also reflecting the history of the Dark Age. Every ancient Greek valued these works for their artistic beauty and their life lessons. Above all, the Homeric epics encoded enduring values and traditions about the nature of the gods and human courage, self-control, loyalty, love, and sorrow. A thousand years later, people were still memorizing Homeric poetry. The (much-shorter) epic poems of Hesiod, The Theogony (Birth of the Gods) and Works and Days, composed arguably in the eighth century B.C., were meant to teach lessons about the role of the gods in human life, the nature of justice, and the problems created by the inequalities of power that arose as the Greeks slowly developed new forms of political and social life in their city-states. Seventh-century lyric and elegiac poets, such as Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, Sappho, and Tyrtaeus, composed shorter works for choruses and for single voices that introduced communal and individual themes relevant to an era of social and political change. Bacchylides, Pindar, and Simonides in the late sixth century and the fifth century became famous for their elaborately artful poems intertwining mythology with current events, often composed in praise of victors in athletic competitions or battles and powerful rulers. The so-called "first philosophers"—who could just as well be called "scientific thinkers"—in the sixth century also wrote poems describing the underlying and invisible nature of reality as they reasoned it must be.
Soon after, Greeks began to write in prose, focusing on ethnography, geography, and myth (a Greek word, mythos, that means stories about the distant past that offered competing versions of the consequences of the often-difficult relationship between gods and human beings). The earliest of these works have not survived except in quotations and paraphrases by later authors. From the later fifth century B.C., however, we do have The Histories of Herodotus. Telling the complex story of the background and events of the extended war between a coalition of Greek city-states and the powerful Persian Empire in the opening decades of the fifth century, Herodotus's unprecedented history generates a sense of wonder through its enormous length (50 percent longer than The Iliad), diverse reporting on a dizzying array of Greeks and non-Greeks alike, and its thematic complexity on human motivation. Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, composed (though not finished) during that long conflict (431–404 B.C.), created the genre of contemporary history written by an eyewitness participant. His biting observations about the human desire for power and the unintended consequences of the violence of war also point to the beginnings of what today is called political science. In the next generation, Xenophon continued Thucydides' history by narrating events in Greece but also made a reputation by producing works about his exciting service as a mercenary soldier in a Persian civil war, the unique characteristics of society at Sparta, the idiosyncratic ideas and behavior of the famous philosopher Socrates (469–399 B.C.), and many other topics.
The fifth century also saw the creation of the primary sources that are perhaps best known today: the plays of the Athenian dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These tragedies sometimes dealt with recent history, but mostly they based their plots on imaginative retellings of myths whose themes connected to life in contemporary Greek society. The characters and emotional conflicts portrayed in these dramas have a universality that keeps them fresh even for performance today. The comic plays of Aristophanes provide another fascinating, if sometimes perplexing, primary source for fifth-century B.C. Athenian society. Skewering his contemporaries with fantastic plots, merciless mockery, and vivid profanity, Aristophanes offers a revealing glimpse of what Greeks said about one another when they were unconcerned with being polite.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ancient Greece by Thomas R. Martin. Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Maps, Plans, Tables, and Figures.................... ix
Preface.................... xi
Acknowledgments.................... xii
List of Abbreviations.................... xiii
Note on Citations, Sources, and Dates.................... xiv
Chapter 1: Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History.................... 1
Chapter 2: From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans.................... 23
Chapter 3: The Dark Age.................... 46
Chapter 4: The Archaic Age.................... 65
Chapter 5: Oligarchy, Tyranny, and Democracy.................... 91
Chapter 6: From Persian Wars to Athenian Empire.................... 121
Chapter 7: Culture and Society in Classical Athens.................... 158
Chapter 8: The Peloponnesian War and Its Aftermath at Athens............... 186
Chapter 9: From the Peloponnesian War to Alexander the Great............... 221
Chapter 10: The Hellenistic Age.................... 253
Epilogue.................... 281
Suggested Readings.................... 283
Index.................... 297
