Ancient Classical Greece

By Marc De Lima

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, in his funeral oration, Pericles says:

"I wish rather to set forth the spirit in which we faced them [battles], and the constitution and manners with which we rose to greatness."

The philosopher Heraclitus said: "Character is destiny."

Along these lines, this book will emphasize the inner forces that formed the spirit and character of the ancient Greeks, rather than the outside forces. So, conjugal devotion, honor, love, and fidelity shaped their greatness. In ten intensive keys we shall read about the Greek Gods, the poet Homer, The Iliad, the Odyssey, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Themistocles, The Historians (Herodotus, Xenophon, and Thucydides), culminating with "the first citizen" of Athens: Pericles.

And to have a complete vista, we include appendices about the Mycenaean and Minoan cultures, the curse of the House of Atreus, a summary of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and a brief list of Greek Gods, and goddesses.

This book dispenses with footnotes, indexes, or scholarly language; it is for the soul-searching, self-taught, self-made individuals who thirst to educate themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marc De Lima
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201182373

Marc De Lima

Marc De Lima, a graduate of Columbia University, is a decorated and disabled Vietnam veteran, retired business executive, college professor, editor, translator, and author of over 105 books. He lives in NYC with his wife Mary Duffy and Mister Darcy—a Shih-Tzu.

Book preview

Chapter 1 — Introduction to Ancient Greek Culture

Chapter 2 — In the beginning, the Gods and Hesiod

Chapter 3 — The Itinerant, Blind Poet Homer

Chapter 4 — The Iliad and The Odyssey

Chapter 5 — Socrates (470-399)

Chapter 6 — Plato (427-347)

Chapter 7 — Aristotle (384-322)

Chapter 8 — Themistocles (524 – 460 BC)

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

Chapter 10 — Pericles’ Glorious 5th Century

Epilogue

Appendix A — The Mycenaean and Minoan cultures

Appendix B — The Iliad Summary

Appendix C — The Odyssey Summary

Appendix D — Greek Gods and Goddesses

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.

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Map of Greece in 5th century BC

Map Description automatically generated

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 numerous 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. At that time, 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.

Of the 70 or 90 plays ascribed to him, only seven plays survived as finished products: Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, the Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides), and Prometheus Bound.

Aeschylus was an innovator and added new features to the traditional tragedy, such as revolving platforms, trap doors, and striking customs. In addition, he was fond of imagery, mythic allusion, grandiose language, puns, and riddles.

Sophocles

Sophocles (496 BCE—405 BCE) was born in the deme Colonus near Athens. Besides being a successful playwright, he took part in Athenian political and military affairs.

After his death, the Athenians worshipped him as a hero and offered an annual sacrifice in his memory. In later times, the Athenians erected a statue to him. If Aeschylus is the creator of Greek tragedy, it was Sophocles who brought it to perfection.

The proficiency shown in his tragedies appears, above all, in the strength of his characters, which are developed with scrupulous care, and great effort to clothe them with divinity touches.

Of the entire glorious century of Pericles, one hymn that honors man — the