The Ancient West

By Geoffrey Gibson

The general history of ancient Greece and Rome is traced separately and then their contribution to the West is looked at under the headings Gods, Rulers, Thinkers, Writers, Artists and Historians. This is the first in a five volume History of the West that is published at the same time. One theme recurs - in what sense was either ancient Greece or Rome civilised? 66,000 words, fully annotated, with chronology. No other book treats this well-worn subject this way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Geoffrey Gibson
• Release date: Jun 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310667817

Geoffrey Gibson

Geoffrey Gibson is an Australian writer living with the Wolf - his dog - in a kind of rural peace one hour out of Melbourne, the home of his football team, the Melbourne Storm. He has practised law as either a member of the Bar or a major international law firm. He has presided over at least one statutory tribunal for nearly thirty years and he has conducted arbitrations or mediations in Australia and the U S. He has published five books before on the theory and practice of the law, A Journalist's Companion to Australian Law (Melbourne University Press); The Arbitrator's Companion (Federation Press); Law for Directors (Federation Press); The Making of a Lawyer (What They Didn't Teach You at Law School) (Hardie Grant); and The Common Law - A History (Australian Scholarly Publishing)). He is now focussing on writing in general history, philosophy, and literature, fields that he was trained in and that he has pursued over very many Summer Schools at Cambridge, Harvard, and Oxford universities. His twelve eBooks so far published include five volumes of A History of the West - The Ancient West; The Medieval West; The West Awakes; Revolutions in the West; and Twentieth Century West; Confessions of a Babyboomer; Confessions of a Barrister; Parallel Trials, Socrates and Jesus; The English Difference, The Tablets of their Laws; The German Nexus, The Germans in English History; The Humility of Knowledge, Five Geniuses and God; and Windows on Shakespeare. The photo is not great, but at least the Wolf comes out OK.

Book preview

THE ANCIENT WEST

VOLUME I

OF

A HISTORY OF THE WEST

By Geoffrey Gibson

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Published by:

Geoffrey Gibson at Smashwords

Copyright (c) 2014 by Geoffrey Gibson

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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In Memory of Weary Clark.

Marcus, we are but shrubs, no cedars, we

No big-boned men framed of the Cyclops’ size;

But metal, Marcus, steel to the very back,

Yet wrung with wrongs more than our backs can bear:

And sith there’s no justice in earth nor hell,

We will solicit heaven and move the gods

To send down Justice for to wreak our wrongs.

Come, to this gear. You are a good archer, Marcus.

[Titus Andronicus.]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

OUTLINE OF A HISTORY OF THE WEST

PROLOGUE

ATHENS

Homer; Lycurgus; Solon; Peisistratus and Cleisthenes; Miltiades, Leonidas, Themistocles, and Pausanias; Cimon; Pericles; Alcibiades; Epaminondas; Philip; Alexander.

ROME

Aeneas and Romulus; Hannibal; Cato the Elder; Tiberius and Caius Gracchus; Marius and Sulla; Pompey; Julius Caesar; Antony and Cleopatra; Octavian (Augustus); Tiberius, Claudius, Caligula, and Nero; Trajan, Hadrian, Constantine, and Justinian.

GODS

RULERS

THINKERS

WRITERS

ARTISTS

HISTORIANS

EPILOGUE

CHRONOLOGY

753 Traditional date birth of Rome

750 Homer and Hesiod write (perhaps)

730 Spartan conquest of Messenia

675 Lycurgus at Sparta

621 Laws of Draco

594 Laws of Solon

585 Thales predicts eclipse

546 Peisistratus tyranny

508 Cleisthenes reforms

499 Ioanian revolt

490 Battle of Marathon

480 Thermopylae, Salamis

479 Plataea, Mycale

478 Delian League

468 Sophocles wins over Aeschylus

461 Cimon ostracized

458 Oresteia of Aeschylus

454 Delian League treasury to Athens

431 Peloponnesian War; Medea of Euripides

430 Plague at Athens

428 Revolt at Mitylene

416 Destruction of Melos

404 Athens capitulates. Rule of Thirty.

371 Domination by Thebes

362 Thebes defeats Sparta

359 Phillip king of Macedon

336 Accession of Alexander

323 Death of Alexander

216 Battle of Cannae

146 Carthage destroyed

133 Tribune Gaius Gracchus

123 Tiberius Gracchus

107 Marius consul

88 Sulla marches on Rome

73 Spartacus revolt

70 Crassus, Pompey consuls

48 Caesar defeats Pompey

44 Caesar murdered

43 Second triumvirate

23 Constitution of Augustus

4….Accession of Tiberius

41 Claudius

54 Nero

98 Trajan

117 Hadrian

312 Christianity state religion

324 Constantinople founded

476 End of western empire

527 Justinian

1453 Fall of Constantinople

1806 Last emperor of Holy Roman Empire abdicates.

THE SCHEME OF A HISTORY OF THE WEST

Historians have tended to see the history of the world in phases. Typical phases are prehistory, the ancient or classical world, the Middle Ages, the renaissance and reformation, and the modern world. The scheme of this history of the West will come in five volumes as follows.

The Ancient West

We speak of ancient Greece and Rome. People get excited about the detonation of modernism about one hundred years ago with people like Darwin, Marx, Freud, Joyce, Einstein, Picasso and Keynes, but all that may pale beside the explosion in the European mind in Greece about five or four centuries before the birth of Christ. Within a very short time, a very small number of people invented, we might say, politics, democracy, logic, philosophy, history, and drama, and they even scoped, as we might now say, what we know as atomic theory. But they could not stick together. The Greeks were able to coordinate something resembling a national response to Persia, and they therefore stopped the Asians at the gates, but then internal division made them sitting ducks first for Macedon, then for Rome. Their flowering time was very short – say, two hundred years.

Rome took about eight hundred years to reach the peak of its empire. We see continuous growth through military conquest, and a kind of peace over pretty well the known world before the fall of Rome in the fifth century after Christ. We tend to remember Rome more now for its laws and roads than for its works of the mind or for works of grace.

Both Greece and Rome were fatally flawed, although Rome took much longer to meet an opponent who could exploit the weakness. The Greek cities were not able to find a common cause and knit together. The Romans could never put in place a stable constitution with a decent succession policy.

You can find an outline of the two histories in the Prologue to this volume. We shall sketch a history of more than a millennium by looking at the lives of the major players, and the contribution of Greece and Rome to civilization under the headings, Greece, Rome, Gods, Rulers, Thinkers, Writers, Artists, and Historians.

The Medieval West

We speak of a time lasting about one thousand years after the fall of Rome. The world retreated from the high learning of Greece, and was dominated by a church that claimed to be based on the teaching of a tearaway young Jewish hasid (holy man) called Jesus of Nazareth, or the Christ by his followers. He stood on a mountain side and said that the meek shall inherit the earth, and that if someone strikes your face, you should turn the other cheek. He signed his own death warrant when he took the lash to the money-changers in the temple.

Well, that teaching was far too strong to be taken neat. The centre of the church was moved from Asia to Europe – to Rome which became a real political player in its own right, even though it was the organ of the grizzly judicial murder of the Christ. Then the teaching was sterilised by being drenched in the ethereal logic of Plato and Aristotle, so that it became safe and malleable, and ultimately comprehensible only to the priestly elect. They claimed to hold the keys to the gateway to eternal life or to the everlasting bonfire. The risk was that you might end up with a tyranny of the intellect posing as a church. We tend to crave some kind of spiritual comfort or security. Reaching out for God comes naturally.

The other theme that runs through this period is the search for physical security in the political vacuum that was left after the fall of Rome. Men sought security in a bad lawless world by offering service in return for protection. This led to what we call the feudal system. It operated much as the Mafia does where the power of a central state breaks down. People pay for protection in the physical world as well as in the spiritual world.

It is toward the end of this period that we will first see civilization in the sense that that term is now used in the West begin to form. It did so in the unwashed persons of English common lawyers as they started to crystallize something called the rule of law. The church no longer had a monopoly over learning. People could now look to the law as well as to God to stand between them and their king or lord. We will see the start of a transition from religion to law as the ultimate arbiter and protector. Here, indeed, was a giant step for mankind. The implications of these moves will become clearer as you read the definitions at the end of this Scheme. Those implications are not well understood.

We shall look at this period under these headings: the Spectres of Dante and the Pilgrims of Chaucer; Mohammed and Charlemagne; Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas; Serfs and Peasants; Lords and Vassals; Soldiers and Priests; Knights and Lords; Kings and Popes; Crusaders and Charlatans; and Lawyers and Judges. It is not boring at all – contrary to what you may now think.

The Awakening of the West

We appear to have in us two very deep instincts. We want to be free of control by others and we seek to increase the ambit of what we may know. It therefore looks to us now that it was just a matter of time before the high learning of Greece and Rome would come back to the fore in Europe, and for people to rebel against corrupt and blackmailing potentates claiming to have inherited the power if not the throne of the Caesars in something as weird as the Holy Roman Empire. (The word Caesar in Latin was pronounced Kaiser. Hence that German word; the Russian word, Tsar or Czar, has a similar derivation.)

The first movement is known as the Renaissance (rebirth) and the second is called the Reformation. Contrary to common belief, the Church of Rome was a beneficiary of both. Both involved rebelling against the idea that our minds should be closed to suit the limits or appetites of others, or the idea that works of scripture or what we call philosophy should be invoked to settle issues of astronomy or gynaecology.

The rebirth commenced largely in Florence. It was followed by what was traditionally called the High Renaissance centred in Rome. The spiritual Reformation exploded hotly in Germany. It was followed by a very cold version in Geneva. Typically, the English went their own perverse non-European way. There the reformation had almost nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with politics. History has not paid enough attention to the impact of this attainment of religious Home Rule on the revolutions in England that we look at later.

The German philosopher, Kant, said that enlightenment is our emergence from our self-incurred immaturity. The Enlightenment is the name given to the period following the events under the umbrella of renaissance and reformation when thinkers and artists focussed more on man than gods, and the quest for freedom became doctrinaire.

The main figures in those three very broad phases form the subject of this book.

We need not be unduly confined by time-lines or labels, and we will consider these issues by looking at the lives of the following people grouped by place of residence rather than the old labels or the time frames associated with those labels that are referred to above. We will do so as follows:

Prologue

Protesters (Dominic, Francis, William of Ockham, Wyclif, and Hus)

Status quo (The Renaissance Popes)

Florence

Rome and Venice (Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Giorgione, Titian Machiavelli and Galileo)

Germany (Durer, Luther, Kant, Goethe, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Marx.)

England (Cromwell, More, Shakespeare, Milton, Coke, Mansfield, Newton, and Darwin)

Switzerland (Calvin, Rousseau)

Spain (Cervantes, El Greco, Goya)

Holland (Erasmus, Spinoza, Rembrandt)

France (Montaigne, Descartes, and Voltaire)

United States (Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, and Holmes).

It will be apparent that those lives start in the Middle Ages and go well into the twentieth century. They will therefore cross all the boundaries of the revolutions considered in the next volume. Well, labels make bad masters, boundaries are made to be crossed, and this scheme seems a good way to deal with a broad canvass while keeping up our interest in real people.

Revolutions in the West

Sometimes the pressure for change becomes so great that if those in power are incapable of making sufficient concessions, there is an explosion. Where people change not just those in power but the very basis of government itself, and they do so by force or the threat of force, we say that there has been a ‘revolution’. These events tend to stand out in our histories because we tend to put more weight on what has been bought with blood. (That is one reason why Australia is so boring and placid. We only spill blood in other peoples’ flops.)

The English have an unchallenged genius for deniable, incremental change, in a constitution which they built up over a thousand years or so, but even they had two authentic revolutions, one in 1641 and one in 1689, and they had a gruesome civil war in between. Additionally, we shall look at the American War of Independence (starting in 1776), the French Revolution (starting in 1789) and the Russian Revolution (starting in 1917).

The recurring theme is the willingness of those who get into a club to slam the door in the faces of those coming after them. People who think that the glimmer called the Arab Spring can be dealt with inside, say, five generations may wish to reflect on the English experience, or the Russian, or even the agony of France for the century after 1789, or the guilt of the United States before it was purged by its Civil War.

The West in the Twentieth Century.

We will look at the completion of the industrial revolution and the current onset of the technological revolution (which is destroying minds, manners, and jobs); the horror of peoples’ wars and nuclear weapons; a world depression and the threat of a recurrence of economic collapse; the popular sterility of modernism in the arts apart from jazz; the claimed death of God, the complete absence of any alternative, and the humiliation of a world church; the rise of professional sport as a business and as the new opium of the masses; the appalling moral collapse of three entirely ‘civilized’ nations (Italy, Germany, and Spain); the depravity of three of the most evil people in history (Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler – Mao is outside our field); the way that Einstein and computers can leave us feeling powerless in a world that we now have to take on trust; wins and losses on racism; the challenges of what will be the dominant religion, Islam, the faith of the East, and what will be the strongest economic power, China; the mediocrity and possible seizing up of democracy; the extinction of the aristocracy, and the movement of wealth from land to capital; the growing divide between rich and poor; and what some see as the closing of the western mind, the emptiness of its art, and the failure of its pillars and institutions.

We shall look at these questions while looking at the lives of Kaiser Wilhelm, Henrik Ibsen, Henry Ford, Lloyd George, Edith Cavell, Albert Einstein, James Joyce, John Maynard Keynes, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Stalin, Louis Armstrong, Pablo Picasso, Generalissimo Franco, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Charles de Gaulle, Harry Truman, Walt Disney, Elvis Presley, Maria Callas, John Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Margaret Thatcher, Silvio Berlusconi, Bill Gates, and Angela Merkel. The American weighting is not surprising in what we now call the American century.

Some terms defined – ‘The West’

By the West, I mean Europe west of the Ukraine, including the United Kingdom, and Ireland, America north of the Rio Grande, and, I suppose, Australia and New Zealand.

‘Civilization’

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘civilize’ as ‘to make civil; to bring out of a state of barbarism, to instruct in the arts of life; to enlighten and refine’. People who extol ancient Greece and Rome as ‘civilised’ obviously use the word in this final sense. They see ‘enlightenment’ and ‘refinement’ as being enough to outweigh the barbarity of slavery or their many-godded naturalistic religions. They see civilisation even though neither Greece nor Rome had then been blessed with the respect for the dignity of each human life that is at the foundation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and which is elemental to our concept of ‘civilisation’. Unlike Hamlet, the ancients had not heard the beautiful notion ‘that there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’

In his wonderful TV series and book, Civilisation, Kenneth Clark asked what civilisation is. He said: ‘I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms – yet.’ He then compared a tribal African mask to a sculpture of the 4th century B C, the Apollo of the Belvedere. He said ‘I don’t think that there is any doubt that the Apollo embodies a higher state of civilisation from the mask.’ He supported that claim in this way.

There was plenty of superstition and cruelty in the Graeco-Roman world. But, all the same, the contrast between these images means something. It means that at certain epochs man has felt conscious of something about himself – body and spirit – which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these quantities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection – reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways – through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed on the physical world. The children of the imagination are also the expressions of an ideal.

It is curious that Clark made no reference to ‘the arts’, ‘enlightenment’ or the ‘refinement’ of the OED – they are most emphatically what his series and book were all about. We find there very few references to myths, music, dance, or philosophy. Instead, we now hear of a quest for ‘an ideal of perfection’ which will apparently do enough to balance ‘the superstition and cruelty in the Graeco-Roman world.’

There are at least three issues with the notions identified in the OED or by Kenneth Clark. First, most people could not give a hoot about and do not appreciate the kinds of enlightenment or refinement referred to; indeed, most people in a pub would have trouble in following just what Clark was saying.

Then the relative terms are in any event very plastic. Views may differ on what is art, what is refined, or what is enlightened, or what might be seen as an attempt to reach the ideal of perfection. What if a member of the tribe represented by the African mask did not think much of the Apollo of the Belvedere? By what criteria might a product of the Western Establishment say that the black man was wrong? What might we say about the adverse reaction of a slave from the sweat of whose brow the Apollo was wrought? I might say that if I were choosing art for my home or place of work, I would much prefer the African mask to the Apollo of the Belvedere; but, then, I like aboriginal art, which would have been foreign to Clark, and pop art, which would have appalled him. The fact that the Apollo is a ludicrously idealised and stylised portrait of a vain pagan god that Napoleon looted from the Vatican does not add to its charms.

And, finally, it is not much good having a refined ear for Mozart’s Requiem if you can be murdered in your bed, or your having a Ph D for analysing the downward smile of the Mona Lisa of Da Vinci if you can be cast into prison forever on the mere say so of a prince or a bishop – or if you just cannot get enough food or water to live.

In my view, most people in the West now have a different view of what the word ‘civilised’ should mean. They would, I believe, go along with something like the following. In my view a nation or people cannot call itself civilised unless each of the following five criteria is met.