History exam

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Hellenic Greece
as opposed to Hellenistic Greece

  • Four River Civilizations
  • Jared Diamondgeography matters
  • Crete does not have a river, so, commerce

  • EARLY GREECE: to 750BCE
  • Minoan; Mycenaean; Dark Ages, Recovery
  • ARCHAIC GREECE: 750BCE to 500 BCE
  • CLASSICAL GREECE: 500 BCE to 338 BCE

  • Country with a lake at its center
  • Never more than 35 miles from water
  • Never was something called Greece
  • Never a unified state but were citizens of particular cities

Early Greece
Minoan Crete: 2000 to 1500 BCE
Island of Peace

  • Sir Arthur Evans--1899
  • Knossos
  • Crete
  • Aegean Sea
  • Fresco

  • Architecture
  • Absence of ruler exalting monuments (graves of bones though)
  • Four major palaces 185
  • Social stratification
  • Men and women shared public life
  • Peace
  • Absence of fortifications

  • Thalassocracyruler of the sea

  • Civilization centered around unwalled palaces

  • Commerce
  • Commerce rather than agriculture
  • Traded crafted goods
  • Had a monopoly on trade
  • Traded olive oil—1607

  • Religion
  • Personal, small shrines, no big anthropomorphic gods
  • Centers on nature

  • Writing
  • Linear A—a list of names followed by numbers
  • Remains uninterpreted

EARLY GREECE

Mycenaean Greece: 2000 to 1200 BCE

  • Between 2300 to 1700 BCE a new population settled mainland Greece
  • Polytheism

  • Pantheon
  • Zeus
  • Hera
  • Poseidon
  • Trojan War
  • Agamemnon
  • 1300 BCE culture declines, not sure why
  • Dorians

EARLY GREECE

The Dark Age of Greece: 1200-800 BCE

  • Dorians
  • By the 13th century BCE a Greek speaking people who lived north of the Greek mainland in the Balkans began to appear in Greece. Historians believe that these people, who were known to the Mycenaeans as the Dorians, were probably responsible for the widespread destruction of Mycenaean Greece. The Dorians settled heavily in the Peloponnesus and the islands of the Aegean Sea.
  • Ionians
  • “The Dark Age also produced a new pattern of Greek migration. During this period, Mycenaean Greeks, who were probably trying to escape the political insecurity and loss of crops caused by the Dorian invasion, began leaving the Greek mainland for other places: islands in the Aegean Sea, and SW Asia’s coast which became known as Ionia. (DLI)

  • Greek Pantheon
  • Zeusfather of gods
  • Herahis wife
  • Zeus's siblings
  • Poseidan—god of the seas
  • Hestia—goddess of the hearth
  • Demeter—goddess of agriculture and marriage
  • Zeus’s children
  • Aphrodite—goddess of love and beauty
  • Apollo—god of sun, music, poetry, and prophecy
  • Ares—god of war
  • Artemis—goddess of the moon and the hunt
  • Athena—goddess of wisdom and the arts
  • Hephaestus—god of fire and metallurgy
  • Hermes—messenger of the gods

  • Gods behaved like humans except they were immortal and strong
  • Worship was not emotional
  • Private morality was to do good to friends and harm to enemies

EARLY GREECE

Signs of Recovery: 800 BCE

  • Hellenic Greece: Greece before the Empire
  • Three distinct regions of HellasHellas is root word for Greece (Hellas is mainland Greece)
  • Peloponnesus, had largest city Corinth, & greatest military power Sparta
  • Attica, the northeast region of Peloponnesus, home to Athens
  • Cities on northern coast of Gulf of Corinth

  • Greek alphabet—helps spread the written Greek language
  • Phoenicians—because of their travels from Greece, met Phoenicians who had a phonetic alphabet
  • Homer—fate governs the world!
  • Iliad—Troy and the Trojan War
  • Odyssey—Homer’s odyssey to return home after the Trojan War
  • Greek Mythology (US mythology?)

  • Mount Olympus—Greek worship celebrated their Gods, hence the birth of the olympics
  • Fates—three old sisters who spun and wove the thread of destiny
  • Muses--patron goddesses of the arts
  • Titans

  • Furies—female deities who lived in the underworld and exacted vengeance on evil-doers
  • Heroes—for example, Hercules
  • Olympics—786 BCE

ARCHAIC GREECE: 750 to 500 BCE

  • A turning point in Greek History
  • Revolution in Politics, Artistic traditions, Intellectual values, Social structure

ARCHAIC GREECE: 750 to 500 BCE

Birth of the Ethnos and the Polis/city states

  • Provided Justice
  • Provides a defense
  • Identity shifts from membership in a tribe to citizen of a polis/city-state
  • Starship Troopers
  • Thomas Hobbes:
  • Life outside society would be 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.'
  • Who did he read? Who read Hobbes?

Society in Archaic Greece:

  • Artisans and merchants became more important but farmer remained most important
  • Farmers
  • Grew wheat, grapes for wine, olives for oil—cooking and lighting, green vegetables and fruit
  • What happens in 1607?
  • Sheep and goats for milk and cheese
  • Meat came from sacrificed animals
  • Life is hard

  • Aristocrats:
  • Employed laborers, sharecroppers and slaves
  • Center of their life was social
  • Contests: boxing, wrestling, chariot races
  • Life is pretty good

  • In 8th century BCE, as the polis emerges, Greeks are crowded, beginning to spread out, move into other areas, establish colonies. Two reasons:
  • one, overpopulated for the food supply;
  • two, needed more land, desperately needing more farmland.

  • Colonized around Aegean sea, on parts of Asia Minor, in southern parts of Italy, France, and Spain, trading with others as they go.

Colonial Expansion

  • Need new defenses
  • Phalanx of hoplite soldiers

  • Two poleis battled over a piece of land, for example, the invading army hit when crops were almost ready for harvest—so battles were limited, win or lose

So what?

  • A social development with political results
  • Hoplites are fighting for their city-state but have not voice in it
  • If they risk their life, should have a voice
  • This emerges 700-600 BCE

Sparta and Athens

  • There is no typical community or city-state
  • But, there were two very different cities
  • Sparta: to manage revolts of the Helots (650- BCE), Sparta focused on military
  • Athens: better land, more food, less conflict

  • By the end of the Archaic age, there were two groups in Sparta: Equals and Helotsstate owned slaves who outnumbered Spartans 10 to one
  • Because of the constant threat of helot revolt, Sparta becomes very militaristic, ie, small children raised to be fighting machines, particularly effective soldiers.
  • Equals were given conquered land which was worked by helots
  • Good order and obedience to laws preserved order

  • Spartan equals were made, not born
  • Public officials examined infants to determined who lived and who was abandoned
  • Birth until age seven, sons lived with mother

How they were made:

  • Age 12 began to train with swords and spears
  • Slept on mats, encouraged to steal food
  • Older boys selected younger boys for homosexual lovers—culture of dominance
  • If he survives until age thirty, he becomes an Equal
  • Women trained as well, just to improve childbearing abilities

  • At 20 enrolled in army
  • At age 20, sent out to kill a helot
  • Lived in barracks with peers until age 30
  • And became a full citizen

  • All of this is too focus loyalty to the polis, not the family

  • There were never that many, so they allied with others—the Peloponnesian League making Sparta the most powerful city-state

Democratic Athens

  • Athens prospered due to location
  • Ruled by a council of nobles
  • But class conflict emerged—less successful farmers borrowed from wealthy neighbors, defaulted and were enslaved
  • Poor revolted
  • Solon emerges

  • Solon: Sets up reforms for Democracy
  • Saw the advantage of compromise

“Shaking off Burdens”

  • Ended the practice of enslaving those in debt and loans that could lead to enslavement were banned
  • Lowered property requirements for citizenship
  • Initiated the trial by jury
  • Weights and measures standardized
  • Adopted a lighter silver coinage
  • Cultivated olive trees as agricultural commodity

Solon Cleisthenes

  • Cleisthenes: Founder of Democracy
  • Made representation in the Athenian assembly reflect location rather than tribes
  • Expanded the number of citizens to 500 in the assembly; 10 groups with 50 representatives
  • Increased devotion to Polis and weakened regional loyalties

CLASSICAL GREECE: 500 BCE to 338 BCE

  • Two spheres of influence: Sparta and Athens

Athenian dominance

  • Delian League—an alliance of city-states controlled by Athens
  • Pericles began to use Delian League money to build Athen’s navy
  • So, this war, provoked by Athen’s abuse of funds, becomes a battle between the cultures of Athens and Sparta, democracy versus militaristic.
  • Athens lost.
  • Peloponnesian Wars weakened all of Greece

  • Age of Pericles
  • Expanded powers of assembly
  • Jurors and magistrates were paid
  • All citizens eligible to serve
  • Abolished property requirements for office holding
  • Birth of Patriotism
  • Funeral Oration

Meanwhile,

  • an intellectual response to how to remain good when the world isn’t
  • Socrates—only known because of Plato
  • Unexamined life is not worth living
  • Socrates says, know yourself— “To know good is to do good.”
  • What does NT say, “19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”

  • Plato/Platonism—what is real
  • Forms—the idea of a chair—stop studying change!
  • There are absolutes—not different points of view

1 Corinthians 13:12 King James Version (KJV)

12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

  • Aristotle as Empiricist: Aristotle (whose thought is described as Aristotelian), the student of Plato, becomes a kind of polar opposite.
  • Aristotle says there is no perfect realm, just what we see. The idea of chairness is what we see, no separate timeless existence.

  • Also said that the soul is what gives the body meaning, soul goes with the body at death.
  • Aristotle is an empiricist, focusing on the here and now.

School of Athens

CLASSICAL GREECE

  • Culture of Hellenic Greece
  • Architectural

Drama

  • Sophocles, in the Oedipus trilogy, killed his father and married his mother. An oracle predicted as much. In order to avoid that horrible fate for their son, and themselves, the parents abandoned their son on a mountaintop, ostensibly killing him. He survives, is discovered by a shepherd who delivers him to the king and queen of Corinth, and is named Oedipus. In their care, Oedipus hears of the prophecy. To avoid his fate, he leaves. On his journey he encounters and kills an old man. When he reaches Thebes he correctly answered a riddle (who walks on 4, 2, then 3 legs?) posed by a sphinx, one is tormenting the city. As a result he is married to the queen (the tradition when the king is dead). Well, of course, he has fulfilled the prophecy. The old man on the road was his dad and the queen his mom. She commits suicide, he gouges his eyes out. The Point of this macabre tale? He is punished for attempting to avoid is fate, making him guilty of hubris, fatal pride. Humans cannot change the cosmic order of things! So, drama is an excellent way to grapple with life’s themes.

Hellenistic Greece
or
How Greek culture spreads

  • Prior to mid-4th century BCE Greeks did not consider Macedonians a threat
  • Macedonian leaders consciously imitated Greek life—Greek culture and cities
  • As Greece fought each other—eg the Peloponnesian Wars weakened everybody—Philip II consolidated power and began to challenge Greece

  • But before becoming king, Philip II had been held hostage at Thebes as a part of a treaty between Macedonia and Thebes
  • There Philip II learned Greek military and political skills; learns about the phalanx!

  • So, one reason for Philip’s success:
  • Military—trained his infantry using pikes fourteen feet long, four feet longer than those used by Greek Hoplites
  • Macedonian phalanxes moved forward, containing their enemies, and then his cavalry moved in from the sides

Another reason:

  • Philip engineered revolt in Euboea nearby Athens—winning and buying friends
  • Did not want to destroy by military domination, but wanted to use resources of Greek city-states
  • Demosthenes attempted to organize against Philip II

  • By 340BCE, Philip II abandoned diplomacy and used force to subdue city-states
  • In 337BCE, Philip II proposed the League of Corinth, a confederation of Greek city-states
  • Each city ruled itself
  • League led by Philip II or descendant
  • Would send troops to aid Philip II
  • Phillip II murdered 336BCE

  • Philip II left these things for Alexander the Great
  • a unified kingdom
  • a strengthened army
  • Alexander ascended the throne at age of 23, died ten years later

  • Instructed by Aristotle but more excited by tales of heroes like Achilles
  • I love this quotation:
  • “Alexander’s military genius, dedication to his troops, reckless disregard for his own safety, and the ability to move both men and supplies across great distances at great speed inspired the war machine developed by Philip and led it on an odyssey of conquest that stretched from Asia Minor to India.”

  • Alexander destroyed Thebes as a warning to other city-states
  • How to manage a group of strangers?

  • Though Alexander inspired incredible loyalty, he could also be cruel:
  • crucified 2000 people after a difficult victory;
  • had an opponent dragged alive around the city;
  • cut off the ears and nose of one and caged him with a dog

  • Hellenistic cities organized physically like Greeks
  • Introduced eastern gods to Greek gods, eg, Dionysus, god of wine, winemaking, grape cultivation, fertility, ritual madness, theater, and religious ecstasy.
  • Theaters
  • Baths
  • Gymnasium
  • Koine Greek

What about Science?

  • Aristarchus (long before Copernicus)
  • Astronomer who supposed a heliocentric world

  • Copernicus died 1543

  • 230BCE

  • Euclid (300ish BCE)
  • Elements of Geometry
  • Eratosthenes (died 194 BCE)
  • Used geometry to calculate circumference of the earth
  • Archimedes (died 212 BCE)
  • Measured gravitydownward force equals weight
  • 'Archimedes' principle', stating that a body immersed in fluid loses weight equal to the weight of the amount of fluid it displaces

Once they are no longer Hellenic Greece

they move

From external concerns of the polis to internal concerns, philosophy

  • Stoicism
  • Epicureanism
  • Skepticism

  • Theodicy—or why is their suffering
  • Stoicism, the ability to endure misfortune. Stoicism is a philosophy founded by Zeno, not a Greek but from the Mideast. He and followers believed in a rational universe, that there are good reasons for things to unfold as they do; there is a larger plan. With that in mind, it is possible to withstand the nightmare because it is a part of a plan. So we accept and endure, that is our task, to be a part of that order. This tradition is revived again and again.

  • There’s a land that is fairer than day,
    And by faith we can see it afar;
    For the Father waits over the way
    To prepare us a dwelling place there.
  • Refrain:
    In the sweet by and by,
    We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
    In the sweet by and by,
    We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

  • Epicurus—pleasure and suffering
  • Epicureanism, everything in moderation (or the search for optimal pleasure). It is permissible to enjoy one’s life, any pleasure. The challenge is find the optimal balance, enough food to feel pleasure but not so much as to feel discomfort. It is inspired by Democritus, the Greek scientist who put forth an “atomic theory” of the universe. For the most part, these particles behave in orderly and predictable ways, arranged in a pattern, a mechanical view of the universe. Epicures, discovered his ideas, and developed Epicureanism, the basis for serenity, ie, something predictable not the result of manipulation by the gods. If contemplated, this could bring serenity and pleasure. Part of it is contemplating the universe.

  • Skepticism, nothing can be known with certainty, a philosophy of doubt. No way of knowing the secrets of the universe. We can only know by empiricism, ie, by our senses, and they are deceived easily.