Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael K. Kellogg is the author of Three Questions We Never Stop Asking. Educated at Stanford and Oxford in philosophy and at Harvard Law School, he is a founding and managing partner at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel, PLLC.

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THE GREEK SEARCH FOR WISDOM

Prometheus Books

Contents

PREFACE..........................................................................9ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..................................................................11INTRODUCTION: The Glory That Was Greece..........................................13CHAPTER 1: Homer and the Heroic Ideal............................................25CHAPTER 2: Hesiod—Poet of Everyday Life....................................51CHAPTER 3: Aeschylus and the Institution of Justice..............................73CHAPTER 4: Sophocles—The Theban Plays......................................99CHAPTER 5: Euripides and the Twilight of the Gods................................127CHAPTER 6: The Inquiries of Herodotus of Halicarnassus...........................151CHAPTER 7: Thucydides—Power and Pathos.....................................179CHAPTER 8: Aristophanes and the Serious Business of Comedy.......................213CHAPTER 9: Plato—Philosophy and Poetry.....................................239CHAPTER 10: Aristotle and the Invention of Political Science.....................263CHRONOLOGY.......................................................................289SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING..................................................291NOTES............................................................................299INDEX............................................................................329

Chapter One

The Iliad was written, according to the latest scholarly estimates, sometime between 750 and 700. It celebrates the last year of the siege of Ilium (the capital of Troy) by a Mycenaean Greek expeditionary force, a war that took place (if it happened at all) more than four hundred years earlier, between 1200 and 1100.

Four hundred years is a long time. It would be as if a contemporary poet sat down to write an epic on the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England in 1588. And yet it would be completely different. We have written records and firsthand accounts of the Spanish Armada. We know specific dates and the names of the individuals involved. We wish we knew much more; records of that time were spotty to begin with and often lost in the intervening years. But a poet writing today about the Spanish Armada would still have a wealth of detail both to fire and to constrain the imagination.

The Greek alphabet (adapted from the Phoenicians) did not even come into existence until the eighth century. An earlier, syllabic form of writing archaic Greek, known as Linear B, appears to have been used only for accounting records and lists of household stores. Linear A, from the Minoan civilization, has never been deciphered. Linear B was derived from Linear A and applied to the Greek language when the Mycenaeans conquered Crete sometime around 1400. Linear B in turn disappeared from the Greek world during the so-called dark ages between 1100, with the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, and 776, the year of the first Olympic Games.

Homer, then, had no written sources upon which to rely for his account of distant Bronze Age battles. He did not even have the archaeological evidence available to us today. What he did have was an oral tradition, stories and poems handed down through the centuries, inevitably altered and romanticized according to the needs, interests, and customs of the various tellers of the tale. Itinerant bards sang of the fall of Troy at festivals and in princely houses. Two cycles of poems developed, telling not only of the war itself but also of the often-problematic return of the Greek heroes after the sack of Troy.

At some point, around 725, the Iliad was written down in the form we know it today, and it is surely fitting that its reduction to writing was among the first uses of the new alphabet. Some years later, a second poem, the Odyssey, was brought to term. Others in the cycles were presumably written down around the same time, but only the Iliad and the Odyssey have survived, and they survived due to their vital role as the collective bible of Greek culture. (The word bible itself originates from the Greek, ta biblia, meaning "the books," which is how the Hellenistic Jews referred to their sacred writings.) The Iliad and the Odyssey were the books for classical Greek education. The lost poems in the cycles were never accorded the same veneration.

The Iliad is not only the first written work in Greek, but it is the font of Western literature, a tradition that ultimately mixed uneasily, though fruitfully, with the tradition spawned by the Hebrew Bible, whose composition began around 950. Yet the Illiad's origins in prehistory are shrouded in mystery and conjecture.

We do not know if the Trojan War actually happened, though some such event surely formed the kernel of the tales that begat the poem. Indeed, it would be surprising if the powerful, colonizing Mycenaean Greeks and the Trojans did not clash, given the latter's control over the entrance, through the Hellespont, to the trade and material riches of the Black Sea. And the wealthy city—or rather succession of cities—uncovered in 1871 by the amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, arguably shows signs of destruction by fire in the stratum corresponding to the relevant time period.

Nor do we know whether Homer—the legendary blind bard of Chios or Smyrna or any of half a dozen other cities that claimed him as their own—was the poem's author, though a single genius must ultimately have shaped the poem and created it in the form we have it today. It is not just an evolving oral poem, with spontaneous accretions and variations by a succession of anonymous singers through the centuries that some scribe wrote down from whatever performance he happened to hear once the alphabet made it possible to do so. It is a beautifully crafted, organic whole that far surpasses any oral tradition of which we can plausibly conceive. Many elements of that tradition were certainly incorporated into the written poem—including the familiar formulaic phrases (those rendered in English as "the wine-dark sea," "the rosy fingertips of dawn," "swift-footed Achilles," and so on) essential to the hexameter lines—but no unlettered oral tradition could approach the intricate architecture and subtle details of this lengthy work. Homer may have dictated that poem to a scribe, rather than writing it down himself, but the Iliad is a poem with a single author responsible for its final form.

Nor, finally, do we know the related question of whether a single poet authored both the Iliad and the Odyssey, though, again, I believe that to be the case. The same consciousness pervades both poems, making them twin aspects of a complete worldview despite their differences in import and sensibility, just as Shakespeare wrote both Macbeth and The Tempest, and Stendhal both The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. Indeed, the idea that two such surpassing geniuses happened to succeed one another yet were known by tradition under the same name seems eminently implausible.

Ultimately, however, these great questions of homeric scholarship pale before the astonishing beauty and power of the poems themselves. We read Homer, in the end, to understand ourselves and the greatness of our artistic heritage. As the art historian Bernard...