Ancient Classical Greece: Brief essays on Homer, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Themistocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Pericles

By Marciano Guerrero and Mary Duffy

Scholars often write about Athens being the cradle of justice and democracy, about its embellishment, the magnificent temples, public buildings, sculptures, exquisite pottery, and above all the drama, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy that flourished in Classical Greece; but scarce are the commentaries on the soul of the Golden Greeks. Thus,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marciano Guerrero
• Release date: Jun 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9798218011246

Marciano Guerrero

Marc De Lima is a Columbia University graduate, retired college professor, and Vietnam Veteran, who has edited, translated, and authored over 100 books. He lives in NYC.

Book preview

Chapter 1 — Introduction to Ancient Greek Culture4

The Greek city-states (800-500 b.c.) 4

The Olympic Games (776 b.c. - 393 A.D.) 4

Map of Greece in 5th century BC 5

The Oracle of Delphi 5

Athens 6

Greek thought 6

The arts 8

Tragedy and Comedy 8

Chapter 2 — In the beginning, the Gods and Hesiod 25

The Olympian gods 25

Divine intervention 26

Abstractions 26

Chapter 3 — The Itinerant, Blind Poet Homer 38

Chapter 4 — The Iliad and The Odyssey 45

The Iliad 45

The Odyssey 54

Calypso 55

Nausicaa 58

Odysseus Comes Home 60

Chapter 5 — Socrates (470-399) 62

Pythagoras’ Influence 66

Plato and Socrates 66

Aristophanes 69

Athens 69

Chapter 6 — Plato (427-347) 74

Plato’s Influences 75

Plato at Syracuse 75

Plato’s Dialogues 76

Chapter 7 — Aristotle (384-322) 80

The Lyceum 82

The Subjective and the Objective 83

Aristotelian Influence 84

Aristotle’s Death 86

Chapter 8 — Themistocles (524 – 460 BC) 88

Themistocles’ Early Years 88

Ostracism and Exile 89

Chapter 9 — The Historians: Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides 90

Herodotus 90

Xenophon 92

Thucydides (c.460 B.C.- c400 B.C.) 94

Chapter 10 — Pericles’ Glorious 5th Century 98

Pericles’ Rise to Power 99

The Age of Pericles 100

The Persian Wars 101

Marathon 101

Thermopylae 102

Salamis 103

Plataea 104

Delian League 105

Pericles’ Building Projects 105

The Peloponnesian War 106

Pericles’ Funeral Oration 107

Epilogue 111

Appendix A — The Mycenaean and Minoan cultures 113

The Mycenaeans 113

Mycenaeans Conquer the Minoans 114

Collapse of the Mycenaeans 114

Ancient Greece 115

The curse on the House of Atreus 115

Appendix B — The Iliad Summary 118

Appendix C — The Odyssey Summary 125

Appendix D — Greek Gods and Goddesses 133

Chapter 1 — Introduction to Ancient Greek Culture

The Greek city-states (800-500 b.c.)

Around the year 800 b.c., the Greek villages established themselves inland and in the Aegean islands. The nobility snatched the power away from princes and kings, forming different city-states with autonomous political power: Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Argos, and others. But what gave unity and commonality to the Greeks were the feasts, festivals, the Olympic games, and the Panhellenic cults. Hellenic derives from Hellas, which is another name for Greece.

The Olympic Games (776 b.c. - 393 A.D.)

Like all aristocratic cultures, the Greeks were athletes, so they held games in Olympia every four years, until 393 A.D. The Greeks competed in foot races, wrestling, horse races, archery, discus throwing, and other games. The prize was a crown made of olive leaves. The olive trees were sacred, since the belief was that Hercules had originally planted them.

In Athens, the winner, besides the crown, received 500 drachmas, a place of honor at the official table, and a monetary stipend for life.

Map of Greece in 5th century BC

The Oracle of Delphi

The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi was the religious center of Greece. The resident prophet, after eating certain drugs, would go into a trance and announced portents that would take place in the future.

Athens

The city-state of Athens, the cradle of democracy, was also the center of Greek culture. Democracy was a slow process that did not happen overnight. There were periods of transition from tyrants, military dictators, oligarchs, and aristocrats—to a democratic government. In the 5th century B.C., the government in Athens comprised the general assembly of all citizens (excluding slaves, women and all those who lacked civil rights), an executive committee, and tribunals. Pericles, a general, was the head of the executive committee. The totality of the inhabitants of the city-state formed the polis. Within the polis, there were many demes or tribes which lived in peaceful coexistence.

Greek thought

The pre-Socratics (the Greek philosophers before Socrates) loved riddles, like what the Sphinx posed to Oedipus: What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening? Oedipus answered: Man. Anaximander solved the riddle — What has a mouth but never eats, a bed but never sleeps? — when he answered: a river. The Oracle at Delphi answered riddles by giving signs. From riddles, philosophers went to seek a common trait, a unique substance found in all the physical phenomena: the closest they got were the four primitive elements: water, fire, air, and earth.

Heraclitus — the dark philosopher of change — denied the existence of any unchanging substance; to him everything was subject to change, as a river in which one cannot step in twice, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on. Yet, in that flux, there is harmony. In one of his extant fragments, he says,

People understand how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There is a harmony in the bending back, as in the cases of the bow and the lyre.

Parmenides, however, held that only Being can exist, and all becoming is illusory.

As we shall see when we study Plato, an abstraction called ‘the forms’ would be behind all phenomena. A table is useful, but eventually breaks up and discarded, but the form — also called idea or prototype — tableness never deteriorates, nor disappears; since it is eternal, outside time and space.

But the key to understanding the Greek culture, what organizes the material world, is the relationship between experience and thought, the so-called models, prototypes, or forms. While a horse lives and eventually dies, the ‘idea’ of a horse is eternal.

The arts

The Greeks cultivated all the arts. Phidias was a renowned sculptor, painter, and architect whose statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the Seven Wonders of the world. Praxiteles was the finest of the Attica sculptors of the 4th century B.C., famous for being the first to sculpt the nude female form.

In architecture, we distinguish the orders Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, whose differences are recognizable in the columns.

Tragedy and Comedy

To honor the god Dionysus — the god of wine, sexual orgies, and drunken excesses — the Greeks wrote and represented tragedies that the public found cathartic—a cleansing of the soul. Thespis (around 534) originated the genre, which included singing by a choir. The amphitheaters were immense and accommodated the entire polis. The authors competed, and a jury decided on a winner.

Although many authors competed, three poets won most of the time: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Today’s terms Protagonist and antagonist are terms that come from the Greek word agon (fight or conflict). In Greek tragedy, the hero is the victim who suffers punishment for his hubris and pathos.

Just as tragedies, comedies also competed for prizes, but unlike the tragedy, the comedy focused on actual social situations and known citizens. Aristophanes, for example, in his comedy The Clouds, poke fun at Socrates.

Aeschylus (c. 525 BCE - 456 BCE)

'The first casualty, when war comes, is truth.’

Aeschylus was born in c.525/4 in the nearby town of Eleusis. A quasi-monarchical (tyrannical) system governed Athens for over two decades. Soon, the political system developed into a democracy.

After the success of the Persian Wars, the power and influence of Athens in the Greek world grew, bringing both prosperity and conflict.

Aeschylus befriended general Pericles, who financed his play Persians. As it often happened with recognized figures in ancient Athens, soon he got in trouble; in that, his enemies accused him of divulging through his plays the secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Thanks to his military service, he won exoneration. Aeschylus not only was a playwright, but he was also a national hero, having fought in the Persian Wars, in the battle of Marathon in 490 and in the naval battle of Salamis in 480.

A great deal of what we know about Aeschylus’ life, seems to be apocryphal, and so it might the ancient anecdote that tells that an eagle mistaking Aeschylus’ bald spot for a rock on which to drop a large tortoise, killed him by dropping the tortoise on his head.

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