04 Classical Greece

Much of our art and architecture, our literature and philosophy, our democratic politics and our science we owe to the ancient Greeks. That Greece should have had such a powerful cultural influence on the Western world is all the more surprising, given that there was never a unified Greek state. Instead, classical Greece consisted of a collection of rival city-states, with colonies scattered all around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

These city-states had begun to emerge in the 8th century BC, and each one had its own strongly maintained identity, centered around an acropolis—a citadel in which temples were dedicated to the city’s favored god or goddess. This robust sense of independence was partly engendered by the geography of the country, with each city and its surrounding agricultural land isolated from its neighbors by mountain ranges and the sea.

The advent of democracy At first, power in each city-state was in the hands of the leading noble families, although assemblies of adult male citizens might be consulted on certain issues (women and slaves were entirely excluded). But a number of developments ushered in a shift in power. First of all, the spread of literacy and the public display of the laws of the state in written form meant that the power of the nobles was circumscribed and opened to question. Secondly, the establishment of new colonies overseas gave citizens the opportunity to establish new patterns of land ownership and political organization. Thirdly, the development of new and highly effective military tactics, in which the traditional aristocrats in their war chariots were replaced by formations of heavily armed warrior-citizens called hoplites, gave every freeman a very real sense of power, which the state was obliged to respect.

These developments helped to give birth to democracy in a number of Greek city-states, most notably in Athens, the most powerful of them all, where decisions were made by assemblies of all adult male citizens. Democracy was by no means universal, or permanent. There were periods of rule by “tyrants,” or by small groups of leading citizens known as “oligarchs.”

“If the people of Greece could achieve political unity they could control the rest of the world.”

Aristotle, Politics, 4th century BC

The rise and fall of Athens Attempts by the mighty Persian empire to the east to conquer Greece in the early 5th century BC were defeated by a combination of the Athenian navy and the army of the other major Greek power, Sparta. In the wake of this victory, Athens began to impose itself on its less-powerful neighbors and allies, some of whom turned to Athens’s rival, Sparta. Tensions culminated in the protracted and destructive Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). With the defeat of Athens, Sparta became the dominant power—and as resented as Athens had been, leading to a further succession of internecine wars. Greece, thus weakened, became an easy prey to an ambitious warrior-king to the north: Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. With Philip’s victory at Chaeronea in 338 BC, Greece at last became united—but under a foreign ruler.

Greek philosophy and science All these wars had little negative impact on Greece’s intellectual life. It is unclear why the spirit of inquiry should have been so keen in ancient Greece, but that it was is reflected in the fact that our word “philosophy” comes from the Greek word philosophos, meaning “lover of wisdom.” For the Greeks the remit of philosophy covered not only such fields as ethics, metaphysics and logic, but also the whole of what we now call science.

The early Greek philosophers, from the 6th century BC, rejected earlier mythological explanations of the physical world, and sought instead a single element that they believed underlay all things. The followers of Pythagoras looked at how nature might be described in terms of number, while others examined via paradoxes the nature of infinity and such questions as whether change, as represented by motion, is a reality or an illusion.

In the 5th century BC the Athenian philosopher Socrates turned the focus onto ethical and political issues, devising a dialectical method of question and answer to examine the logical validity of propositions. Socrates’ follower Plato asserted that the ultimate nature of reality cannot be grasped via the senses, holding that the physical world we experience is but a shadow of the ideal forms of things.

Plato’s pupil Aristotle had a more analytical approach, attempting to define, catalog and explain the world in which he lived. Thus as well as examining issues in ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics and politics, he also turned his attention to subjects such as biology, physics and cosmology. The teachings of Aristotle dominated both Islamic and Western thought until the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Some notable Greek scientists

·         Pythagoras (6th century BC): realized the Earth is a sphere, and established the numerical basis of musical harmonics.

·         Empedocles (c.490–430 BC): held that all matter consisted of four elements.

·         Democritus (c.460–370 BC) and Leucippus (5th century BC): suggested that matter was made up of minute, identical, indivisible particles called atoms.

·         Hippocrates (c.460–c.377 BC): became known as “the father of medicine.”

·         Euclid (fl. c.300 BC): set out the principles of geometry.

·         Aristarchos of Samos (c.310–230 BC): realized that the Earth rotates about its own axis and orbits the Sun.

·         Archimedes (c.287–c.212 BC): pioneered the field of mechanics and invented many ingenious devices.

·         Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c.276–c.194 BC): calculated the circumference of the Earth with a creditable degree of accuracy.

Artistic influence The Greek approach to art and architecture reflects their philosophy. Their sculptures seek to embody a Platonic ideal of ultimate beauty, rather than depicting actual individuals with all their supposed flaws. Greek architecture based on geometric forms, embodies the Pythagorean belief in the overriding significance of number and ratio in nature and encapsulates all that is meant by “classical art”—balance, proportion, calm, perfection. Greek aesthetic values were borrowed wholesale by the Romans, but largely forgotten after the collapse of the Roman empire. Their rediscovery in Europe in the 15th century led to some of the greatest artistic achievements of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance also saw a renewed popularity, as the subject matter for both art and literature, of the Greek myths and the tales of the Trojan War and its aftermath, as told by Homer and others, notably the Roman poet Ovid. Equally profound in their influence were the great Greek playwrights such as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, whose tragedies explore how humans behave in the most extreme circumstances, eliciting in the audience what Aristotle characterized as “pity and terror.” Their plays have been enormously influential on Western drama, and indeed on the whole way we see ourselves as human beings.

the condensed idea

Greek culture lies at the root of Western identity