ISD 121.18: Ancient Greek Literature

Who were the Ancient Greeks, or Why should we study them?

One might wonder why we should even be talking about an ancient culture in the 21^st century.  With global problems stemming from possible nuclear war, international terrorism, disintegration of the economy, all of which would seem to demand more of our attention than a bunch of dead people, the remains of which are scattered and few.  Who are these ancient Greeks, and why should we even bother to have a class devoted to their literature?  I would like to pose this question and hope throughout the course of this semester, we will be able to have some intelligent answer as a response to it.  For the present, I would also like to point out that there is another seeming paradox concerning these ancient people.  A recent book on the ancient Greek language contains the following sentence “an introduction to the language of the people who began Western Civilization.”  This is a striking claim.  This claim suggests that these Greeks, perhaps self-consciously, laid the foundations of the very civilization that we presently enjoy.  So, let us turn our attention to what can be said about these people. 

The Greeks and the Greek language has a continuous literary history which covers three millennia from the Homeric writings to the present day.  There is good reason to believe that the ancestors of the Greeks launched the first of a series of invasions of the Aegean world as early as 2000 BCE.  The earliest record of the Greeks comes from Hittite sources, certain Hittite letters dated cir. 1335 - 1325 BCE mention a people they refer to as the Ahhiyawa or the Achaeans of Homer.  The various Greek communities referred to themselves as the Hellenes (EllhneV); they called their country Hellas (h EllaV) and their language the Hellenic language (h Ellhvikh glwssa).  We call them Greeks from the Latin Graeci, the name given to them by the Romans, who applied it to the entire people, originally designating a colony in southern Italy.  In Homer, the Greeks are generally referred to as the Achaeans, or the Danai. 

Greek history can be divided into several periods.  The earliest of which is the Mycenaean period stemming from about 1500 to 900 BCE; the dark ages, roughly 900 to 800 BCE; Archaic Greece, roughly 800 to 500 BCE; the Classical period, roughly 500 to 350 BCE; the Hellenistic period; roughly 350 to 90 BCE.  After 90 BCE, Greece was conquered by Rome and made part of the Empire.  The periods of Greek literature we will be examining will come from the Archaic and the Classical periods.^[1] 

Turning now to their literature, one might also wonder why should we look at ancient Greek literature?  Of the literature of the ancient world, a pitiful remnant has survived.  We have, for example, only seven of the seventy-nine plays of Aeschylus that were available at the great library of Alexandria.  One might wonder if the really good stuff was destroyed in the Great Fire that brought the legendary library to its ruin.  In response to this challenge, let me pose the following: we might not be able to answer this question if the Greeks themselves did not or were not self-critical of their own works.  We do have, in our possession, several treatises from the ancient world, the most important of which is Aristotle’s Poetics, that provide criteria for analyzing the beauty of written works.  Of the few surviving remains of this vast literature, all of the plays that Aristotle claims fit the criteria of really great works have survived.  This is not to say that there might have been more really good ones that did not.  But, at least, we do have some of the best that the Greeks themselves thought were the best in our possession.  To address the other challenge, let me now pose another question: the word ‘literature’ has many meanings.  When scholars speak of the literature of a subject, what they are referring to is the vast bibliography of criticism, interpretation, and polemic that has attached itself over the years to every field of study.  Politicians sometimes refer to ‘campaign literature’, referring to the collection of speeches, campaign slogans, etc.  This we might find hard to claim has any literary merit.  However, when we refer to French or American literature, what we are referring to here is a written tradition, available to a large literate public, presenting a canon of great works that define the identity of a civilization, proclaiming its ideals but also brood over its problems and defects, and set a standard against which later writers measure their own achievements.  It is in this sense that we can say that the first such literature in the history of the West is that of Greece. 

This is not to claim that other ancient civilizations had no written literary works.  Ancient Egyptian papyri contain stories and love poems, in addition to a vast collection of religious texts, but ancient Egypt and Egyptian culture was not expressed in epic or drama, nor did it produce authors that rival Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, or thinkers that match Plato and Aristotle, or lyric poets on the level of Sappho.  The clay tablets of the civilizations of the Tigris-Euphrates River Basin (Sumer, Babylon and Assyria) have preserved for us religious poems of great interest.  A creation myth, for example, as well as a genuine epic poem, the tale of the hero Gilgamesh.  And of course the sacred books of the Hebrews, the Biblical Old Testament, contain masterly narratives of a mythical religious nature, historical accounts of the triumphs and defeats of the Israelites and of the greatness and the wickedness of their Kings, as well as love poetry and, in the Book of Job, a powerful exploration of the problem of undeserved human suffering, framed, after a narrative prologue, entirely in dialogue - a sort of embryonic drama.

But all of these written traditions lacked one element essential to the definition proposed above: a large literary public that could read them.  The scripts in which they were recorded could be employed and read only by professional scribes, whose competence came from many years of training.  The Egyptian hieroglyphs were an extremely complicated medium of communication, consisting of logograms, which pictured the object denoted; phonograms, which represented sounds; and determinatives, which helped the reader decide on the precise meaning intended.  The cuneiform scripts of the Middle East were simpler.  They were no logograms, but they were syllables - consonant plus a vowel - each one represented by a different character.  One can imagine, without addressing the explicit difficulty of such a system, how difficult writing simple sentences might be.  For each consonant and vowel combination, there would have to be a different symbol.  What makes matters worse is that, in the case of Sumerian cuneiform, there are several different ways to write the same sound.  Another problem, one that the Sumerians did not have to face, is the inherent vowel attached to the symbol.  There would be no way to write clearly combinations of consonants or diphthongs (combinations of vowels).  Mycenaean, in the second millennium, used a syllabic script that resembled those of the civilizations of the Middle East, but is was unsatisfactory.  This script is often called “Linear B”, which scholars have proven to be an early form of Greek.  This syllabary consisted of eighty-seven characters, and had to be supplemented with “little drawings” of the object in question to make the meaning of the writing clear.  Some clay tablets containing Linear B have little pictures of a sword, or a table, or a chariot in the midst of the writing because the writing system ill fitted the needs of the Greek language.  In any case, all memory of this writing system perished during the Greek Dark Ages.

Another step forward in writing systems is the one that was developed by the ancient Hebrews and Phoenicians.  Instead of the symbol having an inherent vowel, the consonant only was represented.  The vowels were supplied from memory.  The Greeks adopted this system from the Phoenicians with one innovation: they devised separate symbols for the vowels.  We can see the Semitic origin of the Greek alphabet, not only in the shape of the symbols, but also in the names of the symbols: the Greek alpha, beta, gamma, delta, mean nothing in Greek, but Phoenician aleph means “ox”; beth means “house”; gimel means “camel”; daleth means “door”.  The result of this innovation was that all of the sounds of the Greek language could accurately be represented by the writing, without ambiguity.  Once the alphabet was developed, it was very soon deployed by bards of the time to record oral poems.  Homer may have been the first of these bards to record the vast oral epic poems into a written form.  It is evident that the world Homer describes in the Iliad and the Odyssey is a world of the Mycenaean period.  From Archaeological evidence, what brought about the Greek Dark Ages is wave after wave of Doric Greeks invading the Aegean world.  What they brought with them was the discovery of Iron.  Notice when you are reading the Iliad that all of the heroes use Bronze weapons.  The type of warfare Homer is describing was already a couple of centuries out of date.

We will be spending the next several class periods looking at Homer and Hesiod, two writers of the Archaic period.  I would like to postpone further investigation of these figures until that time.  One final set of comments before we go.  The Greeks did something a bit unusual with their literature.  For each literary style, whatever dialect of Greek that style originated in became the standard for that style.  For example, Herodotus wrote in Ionic Greek.  All later Greek historians write in Ionic.  Homer’s language, although not a living language, became the standard for all epic poetry.  Sappho wrote in Aeolic and later erotic poetry is written in that dialect.  The tragedies were originally written in Doric Greek, and the Chorus portions are written in that dialect long after the Chorus portions were greatly diminished.  Most of the later literature we will be looking at is the product of Athens.  A good portion of that writing was done in Attic Greek, with the exceptions noted above.  Although I do not presuppose that you understand or even desire to read these works in the original, I will bring in very small portions of them for you to hear what they sounded like in the original.  One brief sample for you, as a parting portion, is the difference between these two sentences.  The first is in Doric Greek.  The second in Attic.

pros twn siwn, Aqhnaioi jainesqe eonteV.  Deuro erpete jiloi.

proV twn qewn, Aqhnaioi jainesqe onteV.  Deuro elqete jiloi.

By the Gods! You appear to be Athenians.  Come here friends!