Art and Culture - 04 - Classic Greece

Lecture 4
Classic
Greece
AESTHETIC
EXPERIENCE
AND
IDEAS

In the 6th century BCE (599 to 500 BCE)
there was a remarkable
transformation in Greek life.
Art, politics, science, poetry,
drama, architecture becomes
strikingly more realistic,
innovative, … and at the centre
of this transformation was
Athens.

Within a few generations, we
see, for instance, a
transformation from the
geometric representations of
horses to the realism of black
and red figure pottery.

Last quarter of 8th century BCE (775‐800)

Ring-shaped vessel
900-750 BCE
Museum of Cycladic Art

Pedestalled krater.
Boxing match. From Thebes. 690-670 BCE

c. 620 BC,
now in the Reiss-Engelhorn-
Museum in Mannheim, Germany

Black-figure amphora from Corinth.
Circa 600-575 B.C.

Second quarter of 7th century (650‐625 BCE)

Herakles with Pholos and other centaurs on a skyphos
ca. 580 BC, found in Corinth, now in the Louvre, Paris

Black figure vase - black
silhouettes painted onto colored
background. Lines on the black
were then incised (with a pointed
stick) into the paint before firing. Perseus pursued by gorgons, ca. 575 BCE, Louvre, Paris

Attic black-figure komast cup
Ca 575-565 BCE

Attic black-figure kylix, ca. 560 BCE

Horseman on a late
Corinthean olpe,
ca 575/550 BCE,
now in the Louvre, Paris

Dionysos (named) and two maenads
Ca, 540 BCE
Signed by artist (Amasis)

By Exekias (545‐520 BC) 3rd quarter of 6th century (540‐530 BCE)

Notice the complexity of the composition of the two wrestlers
1st quarter of 6th century (500‐525 BCE)

700 BCE
550 BCE
While there doesn’t
appear to have been
any change
whatsoever in
military technology
during the 150 years
between these two
vases, a vast gulf in
both aesthetic taste
and skill separates
them.

Red figure vase – Figure silhouette
painted in red then black lines sketched
or painted on.
Attic red-figure amphora, ca. 530 BC.

In the 5th century (499 – 400 BCE), the so-called
classic age, Greek pottery (especially Athenian)
begin to show more scenes of common life (in the
above female slaves entertain male guests at a
drinking party).

Palaestra scene
ca, 520-510 BCE

Red-Figure Amphora
with Musical Scene
Ca 460-450 BCE

Drinking bowl, with the
bottom containing this: a
drunk men vomiting, while a
young slave is holding is
forehead.
Let us drink. Why wait for the lighting of the lamps?
Night is a hair’s breadth away. Take down the great goblets
From the shelf, dear friend, for the son of Semele and Zeus
Gave us wine to forget our pains. Mix two parts water, one part wine,
And let us empty the dripping cup—urgently.
Alkaios, seventh-century BCE lyric poet

The girl on the left
carries a pair of
writing tablets and a
stylus. She is
obviously reluctant
but we don’t know
why
ca. 460–450 B.C.

While the mythological past remained an important
inspiration of Greek art, we find many example of
mythological scenes with “lighter” less “heroic” subjects
…

White ground Style – different colors drawn or painted onto white painted ca. 470 B.C.
background. Because it was less hardy, typically used for funerary purposes. Many of
our examples show the deceased on the vessel.

The youth in the center,
undoubtedly the deceased, is
seated on the steps of his
tomb
ca. 420–400 B.C.

Warrior by a Grave
(white-ground lekythos)
c. 410 BCE

Many of these white
figure pieces had
naturalistic painting
“on top” of the
drafted lines.
ca. 440 B.C.

Picasso, perhaps inspired
by the display of white
ground pottery after the
war, used a similar
technique during his so-called
Classic Period.
Picasso,
Portrait of Olga
1923

A similar aesthetic transformation in
free-standing sculpture occurred
from 700 to 450 BCE.

Female figure
ca 1000 BCE
Female figure
ca 700 BCE
Female figure
ca 600 BCE

Male standing figure
ca 750 BCE
Male standing figure
ca 650 BCE

Female standing figure
ca 600 BCE

Female statue
(one of the earliest monumental statues)
ca 650 BCE

Male statue (kouros)
ca 600 BCE
ca 750 BCE

This kouros is one of the earliest marble statues of
a human figure carved in Attica. The statue marked
the grave of a young Athenian aristocrat.
The rigid stance, with the left leg forward and
arms at the side, was derived from Egyptian art.
The pose provided a clear, simple formula that was
used by Greek sculptors throughout the sixth
century B.C.
New York kouros, early 6th
century (575‐600 BCE)

When I took this photo in the
Metropolitan Museum in New
York, I was thrilled to see
afterwards that a tourist was
standing beside it in the
contrasting constrapposto
stance of the later Classic-era
sculpture.

New York kouros, early 6th century (575‐600BCE)
Do you notice anything else that is
unusual about this kouros?

In every other ancient culture (and
in many to this day), being naked is
a mark of shame, the mark of a
slave or a prisoner or a child or a
savage.

Greek statuary was inspired
by Egyptian aesthetics, but
unlike Egyptian sculpture,
which is clothed and which
celebrates a ruler, Greek
statuary seems to
celebrate an ideal.
Egyptian statuary, early 6th century (575‐600 BCE)

These kouroi are essentially an
ordered simplification of the human
form: suggesting a general
statement of Greek heroic
excellence, and not necessarily a
specific portrait.

Female sculpture (korai) about same time.

Modern reconstruction
Peplos kore,, mid 6th century (550 BCE)

Anavyssos kouros
mid 6th century (550 BCE)
“Stand and have pity at the
tomb of the dead Kroisos,
whom raging Ares slew as he
fought in the front line.”

“The statue …… is a device for re-membering what is
gone: frozen in time, Kroisos is always in that state of
perfect beauty he attained on the battlefield.” Richard T. Neer
“In its own way, by the immutability of its material and
shape, and by the continuity of its presence, the
memorial conveys the paradox of the values of life,
youth, and beauty which one can ensure for oneself only
by losing them [by dying in battle].” Jean-Paul Vernant

Kore with the almond-shaped eyes
around 510/500 BCE

Original would have been painted

Original would have had bronze and marble eyes

With the Kritios, the Greek artist has mastered a
complete understanding of how the different parts of the
body act as a system (i.e., achieved naturalism).
The statue supports the body's weight on the left leg,
while the right one is bent at the knee in a relaxing
state. This stance, known as contrapposto, forces a
chain of anatomical events: as the pelvis is pushed
diagonally upwards on the left side, the right buttock
relaxes, the spine acquires an "S" curve, and the shoulder
line dips on the left to counteract the action of the
pelvis.

Modern scholars point to three key
changes in the transition from
archaic to early classic Greek
sculpture:
That is, from
600 BCE (archaic style)
to
500-480 BCE (severe style)

1pose
There is a change of pose from 2D static to 3D open and active
1
g p p

600 BCE 550 BCE 540-530 BCE 530-520 BCE 510-500 BCE 500-480 BCE
Met Kouros Tenea Kouros Kouros Anavyous Piraeus Apollo Kouros Aristodikos Kritios Kouros

For us moderns, we don’t see
anything remarkable in aesthetic
transformation and change over a
few generations … but yet in
comparison to other nearby
cultures, this classic Greek interest
in aesthetic experimentation and
growth was radically unusual.

3000 BCE
2500 BCE 500 BCE
2000 years !!!
400 BCE 2600 years !!!

As a comparison, imagine that this
image of Homer is the only visual
representation of a man you ever
see, your children will see, their
children, and so on, until the year
4712 … that is what art was like for
the Egyptians, extraordinarily stable
and unchanging. This kind of artistic
stability is in fact the norm in
human culture.

That is, for most cultures and for
most of human history, art has been
about continuity with past forms of
representation; it has not been
about innovation or breaking from
the past.

3000-800 BCE 700 BCE 600 BCE 500 BCE
This rapid transformation and experimentation
with artistic representation was an extremely
novel event in human history, perhaps the only
time that comes close was 15th century in Florence and
in late 19th/early 20th century in Paris.

2anatomy
There is a change from relatively superficial marking of bones
2
g y p g
and muscles to the realistic evocation of hypodermal structures
(that is, it looks like real muscles and bones are beneath the
skin of marble).

Athena, Herakles and Atlas, the
Golden Apples of the Hesperides,
metope from the east side of the
temple of Zeus at Olympia.

Note: most classical-era Greek statuary were in fact
made from bronze. Almost no bronze originals survived
antiquity (most were melted down).

The number of surviving
original statuary from the
classical Greek period (500
– 430 BCE) is exceedingly
small.
Unfortunately most of the “famous” examples of Greek
sculpture from this time period are in fact Roman copies
of Greek (Bronze and Marble) originals. Some were cheap
knock-offs to sell to Roman tourists, others were replicas
made for students to study from.

Bronze Warrior from Riace, c. 450 BCE
Found in a shipwreck of the Italian coast in 1972

3psychology
There is a change from smiling blankness of archaic sculpture to
3
g g p
a severe and serene expression which suggests an inner mental
life in classical sculpture.

Compare these archaic-era
faces with …

Which one looks like it is
actually thinking?

So why were they so
interested in achieving
perfect naturalism?

It appears to be a moral and
religious ideal …
Their gods were envisaged to be not only
beautiful but also athletic and fit
530-520 BCE
(influence of the Iliad)
Piraeus Apollo

… and because the Greeks also associated
moral goodness with this type of male
beauty, it was also common for men to
show off their physical beauty …

The men of classic Greece took a
shameless pride in their appearance that
would strike us today as …

In fact because the Greeks of the classic
time period had such a fixation for this
athletic type of male beauty,

it was common for men to spend a not
unsubstantial amount of each day
exercising in public … indeed the ancient
greek word gymnasia meant literally
“place of nakedness”

So … from about 500-480
Greek sculptors had
achieved almost total
perfection in their ability to
accurately reproduce the
natural form of the human
body.
Yet within a generation, the
Greeks gave up on
naturalism (i.e., art as the
identical reproduction of
nature).
Why?

Once you have achieved the ability to
perfectly mimic the human body, what
more is there to achieve as an artist /
sculptor?

Creativity seems to have required
moving away from naturalism …
but to understand this we have to
first learn about baby seagulls …

In a clever experiment, researchers studying
seagull chicks noticed that the chicks peck the red
stripe on the mother’s beak when they are hungry
and want food …. They do this not because they
recognize their mother but because their brains are
stimulated by the red stripe.

They demonstrated this by showing them a stick
with a red stripe on it …… the chicks will peck it.

But when they “exaggerated” the red by showing
them a stick with three red stripes, the chicks
pecked at it much faster and with much more
vigour.

And even strongly prefer the “unnatural” or
“exaggerated” three- striped stick to the natural
one stripe stick.

Some have even argued that our brains are hard-wired
for exaggeration, which can be seen in some
of humanity’s earliest art.

So while works from the early
classical period (500-450 BCE) are
characterized by naturalism and
elegant simplicity, later works
from the high classical era (450-
340 BCE) had a different
aesthetic.
During the late 5th century (440-400 BCE),
Greek sculptures began to subtly
exaggerate the human form but in a way
that appears to maintain naturalism.

Doryphoros (c. 450-440 BCE)
original bronze no longer
exists.
Roman patinated bronze replica Roman Marble Copy

Fourth century (400-350 BCE)
Greek sculptors positioned the
body into odd positions, divided
it into four zones and then
exaggerated the division
between those zones.

Torso of Miletus, c. 480-470 B.C.E

exaggerated
Fully natural
Torso of Miletus, c. 480-470 B.C.E

Discobolus (Discus Thrower).
Reconstructed Roman copy of a bronze
Greek original of ca. 450 BCE

Later Greek Hellenistic works (350 – 200
BCE) continued the trend toward
exaggeration, whether it be in the
musculature or in the relative sizes of
certain body parts.

Laocoön and His Sons, c 100 BCE

Examine the
musculature of the
naturalistic classic
Greek works …
and compare them to
the musculature of
modern gymnastists ...
… there is a remarkable
similarity; clearly the
artists were closely
modeling the fit young
active men of the day
…

In late Hellenistic
Greek sculpture by
contrast, the
sculptural bodies
don’t really
represent real
bodies …

Roman sculpture either copied
existing Greek works or produced
exaggerated portrayals of the face.

Evidence of extreme
respect for experience and
age.

Many Roman sculptures have
youthful Greek-inspired bodies
(sculpted in Greece by Greek artists)
with stern and aged heads
(sculpted in Rome by Roman artists).

Roman version of Photoshop: buy statue of youthful
Greek youth, knock off the head, and attach
realistic portrait of aged Roman patriarch.

Later Roman Empire: male head on woman’s body!

Are we any different today?
Are we also still ““attracted”” to
exaggeration when it comes to
what we find attractive in the
human body?

We will find at different times
in this course, that artists after
the Greeks continued to
exaggerate certain aspects of
the human body in their own
unique search for beauty and
cultural expression …

Contemporary …
Lucian Freud + Antony Gormley

What about female sculpture?
Did the ancient Greeks take a
similar path?

Classic sculpture of the female form took
a somewhat different development path.
During the archaic and classic period,
there appears to be either a prohibition or
reluctance to display the naked female
form.

Artists initially thus had to use tight-fitting
or wet clothes/draperies to show the
underlying form.

Birth of Aphrodite, c. 460 B.C.E.

Pythocritos of Rhodes. Winged Nike (Winged Victory),
from Samothrace, c. 190 BCE

Praxiteles, Aphrodite of Knidos
Evidently the first fully female nude statue. It was
created in 4th century (circa 350 BCE). It was
created by the most famous sculptor in the ancient
Greek world (Praxiteles), but was rejected by its
original patron, the island of Kos (it was for their
temple to Aphrodite) who deemed it immoral.
The rejected statue was purchased by the citizens
of Knidos, who placed it in an open-air temple
where it could be viewed from all sides, and
evidently the city became a tourist attraction
because of it.
Roman copy of Greek original ca. 350
BCE

Thanks to the fame and “charms” of the
sculpture, Knidos became home to a
rather raucous festival for Aphrodite
(goddess of love) and Bacchus (god of
wine).
“Under the welcome shade of the boughs,
comfortable beds await the celebrants——
actually the better people of the town
only rarely frequent these green halls,
but the common crowds jostle there on
festive days, to yield publicly to the joys
of love.””
Lucian

This statue became one of the most famous in the ancient
world. Archeologists have dozens of reproductions, but the
original is lost.
Many of the reproductions modified the original by adding one
or two so-called modest hands (or even drapery) to it.

Aphrodite of Melos (also
called Venus de Milo),
c. 150 B.C.E.

With Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Knidos we
can also see the beginning of the
eroticization of female representations in
western art.
Much of later Greek and Roman female
statuary seem to be about the female
form as an object of desire.
That fetisization of classical nudes has
remained …

… but Greek attitudes towards desire and
art were not always straightforward …

Louvre Hermaphrodite (2nd century BCE).

Not all Greek sculpture
was free-standing.
Important sculptural
works were also
integrated into
architecture.

The caryatid porch of the Erechtheum,
south side, Acropolis, Athens

http://www.utexas.edu/courses/ancientfilmCC304/lecture1/disney_1.html

Kerameikos: cemetery in Athens.
“Go to the Kerameikos to see the reliefs of those who were the
centre of a world and who tomorrow will be unknown and ignored.
See the transition between when short life finishes and eternal
death begins.”

Stele (i.e., grave monument) of Hegeso,
a wealthy Athenian female (c. 410-400
B.C.E.)
For the Greeks, immortality lay in the
continued remembrance of the dead by
the living.

Hegeso is looking at a piece of
jewellery and her pose and face
appear that she is saying goodbye
to worldly concerns and pleasures.

Here lies Aristylla, child of
Ariston and Rhodilla; how good
you were, dear daughter.

Seated woman leaving
her newborn child to a
nurse (Athens, ca.
425/400 BCE)

Young man killed in battle survived by
his father and son.
…It is shocking
when
an old man lies on the front line
before a youth: an old warrior whose head is white
and beard gray, exhaling his strong soul
into the dust, clutching his bloody genitals
in his hands: an abominable vision,
foul to see: his flesh naked.
But in a young man
all is beautiful when he still
possesses the shining flower of lovely youth.
Alive he is adored by men,
desired by women, and finest to look upon
when he falls dead in the forward clash....
—Tyrtaios of Sparta, seventh-century BCE poet

“Stele and my Sirens and
mournful pitcher that hold the little
ash of Hades, tell those who pass
by my tomb to greet me, whether
citizens or from another town, and
say that I was buried here, still a
bride, and that my father called
me Baucis, that I was born in
Tenos, that they may know. And
tell them too that my companion
Erinna engraved this word upon
my tomb.”

Sparta was one of the
most important Greek
Poleis.
It was a rigidly
hierarchical society
focused on the support
and development of a
small core of
communalized military
elites.

Edgar Degas, Spartan Girls Challenging Boys (1860)

Athens, by contrast, was a
multi-ethnic trading city that
eventually (508 BCE) was run
by a direct (not
representative) democracy.
monarchy
oligarchy
tyrant
democracy

Athens source of power was its navy

The city states of Greece eventually came
into conflict with the great power of the
Fifth Century, the Persian Empire, who
were the heirs of the old Assyrian Empire.

By 500 BCE, the Persian Empire was the
largest single empire the world had ever
seen.
It encompassed approximately 8 million km
and had a population of about 17 million
people (which is estimated to have been almost 20% of
the world’s population at that time)

Due to Greek meddling in disputes
between the Persian Empire and its
Ionian territories, the Persian Emperor
Darius decided to invade the Greek
mainland.
He sent an invasion force which landed
near Athens in the Bay of Marathon.

Battle of Marathon (490 BCE)
Athenians
spread into a
long thin line
and charged
down the hill
Persian Fleet disembarked
here in Bay of Marathon

The Persians were
routed, though a
percentage of the
Persian army was
able to escape by
sea.

After the Athenians victory,
Pheidippides (who also fought) ran the
26 miles/40 kilometers to Athens to
announce the victory, inspiring the
modern athletic marathon.

In 480 BC, Darius’s successor,
Xerxes, personally led a gigantic
second invasion of Greece.

To cross the Hellespont, the Persians
built a bridge out of boats, by which
the 200,000+ strong Persian army
crossed from Asia Minor into Greece.

The Greek historian
Herodotus wrote that when a
storm destroyed the bridge,
Xerxes commanded that the
ocean be given 300 lashes.

Naval battle of Salamis (victory mainly won by Athenians)

After the defeat of the Persians, Athens
had its so-called golden age, funded by
the money raised from its naval-based
protection racket (The Athenian League).

The Persian invasion left Athens's Acropolis
in ruins. The rebuilding of the Acropolis
was expensive and a reflection of its
confidence and power.
The most famous of these building
projects was the Parthenon (completed in
438), a temple to Athens’s patron deity
Athena, goddess of Wisdom.

As it appears
As it is built,
i.e, with optical corrections (much exaggerated)
As it would have appeared,
i.e, if it didn’t have optical corrections

It appears as well that the design
of the Acropolis was based on so-called
Golden Ratios.
Biologists, artists, musicians,
historians, architects,
psychologists, and even mystics
have pondered and debated the
basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In
fact, it is probably fair to say that
the Golden Ratio has inspired
thinkers of all disciplines like no
other number in the history of
mathematics.
-- Mario Livy, The Golden Ratio:
The Story of Phi, the World's Most
Astonishing Number

The form of a Greek temple was not a space
inviting entry, but rather a sort of abstract
sculpture marking a place in the world.

The Acropolis was also a celebration of
civic identity. The generation that fought
in the Persian Wars was also the same
generation that experienced the transition
from tyrannical and/or oligarchic rule to
mass participatory democracy.

Note: I don’t
expect you to
remember this: I
just included it to
give you sense of
the participatory
nature of Athenian
democracy.

The sculpture on the Acropolis (now in British Museum),
celebrated the defeat of monstrous invaders by the gods
associated with Athens.
Three female figures form the right side of the east pediment of the
Parthenon.

Three Goddesses from east pediment of the
Parthenon, Athens, ca 437-432 BCE, with color added.

Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends (1868)
by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Parthenon Replica in Nashville, TN, the Athens of The South
(build in 1897, then rebuilt 1931, rebuilt again in 1988)

Temple of Hera at Paestum, c. 560-550 B.C.E..

Homer, Theatre,
and Philosophy

Homer is the attributed author of the
epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, the first
cultural texts of Greek civilization.
Were written in the 8th century BCE (700-
750), soon after the rediscovery of
writing in the Greek area. Most scholars
believe they are the written culmination
of a much older oral compositional
tradition.
The epics recount events about the
Trojan War that occurred about 400 years
earlier (traditional date 1184 BCE).
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Homer_British_Museum.jpg

Homer is, in one tradition, blind.
Even in antiquity, there were
concerns/doubts about Homer.
Thus we have the so-called Homeric
Questions:
Who was Homer?
Were the epics written by one or
many authors?
How were they composed (written
or oral)?
William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) -
Homer and his Guide (1874).jpg

After studying and recording non-literate
oral bards in Yugoslavia in
the 1920s, Milman Parry argued
pervasively that the two Homeric
epics are grounded in oral
composition.
He demonstrated that within oral
cultures, long stories are
“chunked” into more manageable
and memorizable sections by the
use of common, repeated formulaic
epithets that are used to fit into a
rhythm scheme.
(e.g., Achilles is brilliant, godlike, or swift-footed;
the Greek’s ships are black, round,
hollow, or swift).
In this theory, the written stories
are just a snapshot in time of the
oral tradition.

Today most Classicists agree that, whether
or not there was ever a composer named
Homer, the poems attributed to him are to
some degree dependent on an oral
tradition, a generations-old technique that
was the collective inheritance of many
singer-poets (also called bards)

Bard
http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320Hist&Civ/chapters/03EPIC.htm

The epics recount events about the Trojan War that
occurred about 400 years prior to Homer.
The Iliad covers a p period of about 14 y days g
during the
ten-year long siege of Troy.
The Odyssey recounts one of the main characters from
the Iliad (Odysseus) efforts to return to his home, which
takes him an additional ten years.
Both epics are reflections on a lost world (the high
Bronze Age cultures of the Hittites, Mycenae and Minoa)
as well as reflections on a new emerging Greek moral
code and way of life.

The Odyssey is an epic of return, an epic
that focuses less on warfare and its ethic
and more on how a human needs to
behave in the everyday world of emerging
Greek civilization.
Odysseus (and not Achilles) ends up being
the cultural hero of the Greeks of the
emerging classical age.

Odysseus is renowned for his cunning, for
thinking through problems, for knowing
how to act, for having both brains and
brawn.

Odysseus was seen by later Greek culture
to be the epitome of the moral (and
aesthetic) ideal of sophrosyne.
Sophrosyne seems to have referred to the
ideal of living life to its fullest but to do so
with moderation, common sense, and in
the light of self-knowledge.

The Sophrosyne ideal was latter enshrined
at Delphi, the Classic Greek religious
centre, in a variety of sayings carved into
the temples.

γνῶῶθθι σεαυτόόν (gnōōthi seautón = "know thyself")

μηδδέέν άάγαν (mēēdén ágan = "nothing in excess")

Cahill, in his 2003 book claimed
that this ideal of sophrosyne
gave the Greeks insight into the
six key areas of human life, which
are nicely captured by his chapter titles:

Whenever they’d drink the deep-red mellow vintage,
twenty cups of water he’d stir in one of wine
and what an aroma wafted from the bowl—
what magic, what a godsend—
no joy in holding back when that was poured!
Homer, The Odyssey 9 l. 231
The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge
from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the
olive and the vine.
Thucydides
One bowl [of wine] for ruddy health,
then one for getting happy.
The third brings sleep. …
The fourth’s for pride
and the fifth for lots of noise,
The sixth for mindless f _ _ _ing,
and the seventh is followed by black
eyes.
The eighth brings the police,
The ninth’s for throwing up,
And the tenth’s for trashing everything
before passing out.
Eubulus, 4thC BCE Athenian politician

Odyssey Plot Summary
On blackboard in class

The Odyssey begins, not
with Odysseus, but with
his home, with his son
and wife, who are beset
by ill-behaved suitors
hoping to marry
Penelope (since
Odysseus has been away
for 20 years) and
presumably become
king.

Penelope & the Suitors
J. W. Waterhouse

Xenia
Is the Greek word for a very complicated
concept/ideal that is at the heart of the Odyssey’s
moral vision. We don’t really have an English word
that corresponds to it.
It means guest, stranger, friend, foreigner.
Our English word xenophobia (fear of foreigners) comes from this Greek
word.

Philoxenia
Often translated as hospitality or guest guest-friendship.
It proscribed a set of norms that governed how a
host should behave to a guest, and how a guest
should behave to a host.
In a world without inns or hotels, philoxenia was a
vital part of surviving when travelling.

At the beginning of the Odyssey, the suitors are not
following the guest protocols of philoxenia: by
never leaving Telemachus’s house, eating all his
food, constantly wooing Penelope, and sleeping
with the servants.
Calypso is not following the host protocol since she
refuses to let Odysseus leave her island.

Telemachus in contrast shows proper philoxenia.
Straight to the porch he went, mortified
that a guest [xenos] might still be standing at the doors.
Pausing beside her there, he clasped her right hand
and relieving her at once of her long bronze spear,
met her with winged words: “Greetings, stranger! [xenia]
Here in our house you’ll find a royal welcome.
Have supper first, then tell us what you need.”

Telemachus then goes to visit some other veterans
of the Trojan war, looking for word of his father. He
too is treated with proper xenia.
As soon as they saw the strangers, all came crowding down,
waving them on in welcome, urging them to sit.
Nestor’s son Pisistratus, first to reach them,
grasped their hands and sat them down at the feast.
…O
Once they’’d put aside desire for food and drink,
old Nestor the noble charioteer began, at last:
“Now’s the time, now they’ve enjoyed their meal,
to probe our guests and find out who they are.
Strangers-Friends, who are you?”

Meanwhile, Odysseus, thanks to the gods’
intervention, is freed from Caylpso’s island and is
given a raft … which is promptly sunk by a still-angry
Poseidon.
He washes up on the island of the Phaeacians.

He is meet by Nausicaa, a Phaeacian princess, who is
washing clothes on the shore. She clothes him and takes
him to met her parents, the king and queen.

The king rose in his place, and said: "This
stranger has come to my hall. I do not know
who he is, or whence he comes, whether from
the east or the west. And he begs us to convey
him safely to his home. Now this, as you know,
is a thing that we have been used from old
time to do for strangers. Go, then, and choose
out a ship Let it be new—one that never has
been on the sea before. And pick out fifty and
two rowers. Let them be the best and
strongest that there are in the country. When
you have done this, come to my hall and feast.
And let the minstrel come also, for the gods
have given him the gift of song, and there is
nothing better than song to make glad the
Odysseus among the Phaeacians
g g g
hearts of men." So the chiefs of the people
went and did as the king commanded.
…
When the people were ready to begin, there
came two servants of the king leading the
singer by the hand, for he was blind. They
made him sit down in a silver chair in the
middle of the hall; they hung his harp on a rail
that there was above his head where he could
easily reach it. And by his side they put a
table, and on the table a basket full of good
things, and a cup of wine so that he might
drink when he pleased.
Then the people began to eat and drink, and
when they had had enough, the singer sang.

Odysseus tells of all his adventures after
leaving Troy to the Phaeacians.

The Cyclopedes have no concept of xenia;
instead of giving gifts and food, the
Cyclopes eats his guests.

After his cunning escape from
the Cyclops, Odysseus and his
crew sail away and soon find
themselves on Aiolia Island,
the domain of the wind god
Aeolus who provides Odysseus
with enough supplies to return
home including a bag which
contained all the winds except
the ones Odysseus needed to
return home to Ithaca.

Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus
John William Waterhouse (1891)

Odysseus visits Hades, the land of the
dead, in order to get instructions on how
to return home.

Ulysses and the Sirens (1891)
John William Waterhouse

Scylla and Charybdis
http://stevesomersart.blogspot.com/2011/05/caught‐between‐scylla‐and‐charybdis.
html

In Athens, public art celebrated the public
activities of its citizens. Both architecture
and theatre were state-sponsored and
supported.

Theatre at Epidauros, c. 350 B.C.E.

atre at Herodes Atticus, Athens

Greek Theatre/Drama
Two main forms:
Comedy
komos – literally drunken dance/party
Tragedy
y p y
tragoidos – literally goat song

Originally a
religious/participatory/
civic ritual.
Tragedies were performed
during the Festival of
Dionysus, god of
wine/madness/lust.
Dionysus mask

The etymology of tragedy (goat song), perhaps
suggests its basis in an archaic ritual involving the
sacrifice of a goat (scapegoat).
Such rituals appear to have once involved the
expulsion or even killing of a pharmakos, a
cripple/beggar/criminal who was supported at the
city’s expense, but who would be sacrificed by the
polis in response to a crisis.
Perhaps the symbolic killing in drama of the
pharmakos during the Festival of Dionysus is the
beginning of Greek drama.

Like most things in Greek life, the Festival was a
competition between multiple playwrights. Each
year three playwrights would present three
tragedies. One each day of the festival there would
be three tragedies, one comedy, and one satyr
play.
Thespis (mid 550s BCE) is credited for the
introduction of an actor and changed the role of
the chorus (a group of people who spoke together)
so that it interacted with the actor.

The plays contain actors and the chorus (anywhere
from 12 to 50 members). Everyone would be
wearing masks. The chorus typically represents the
general population of the city.
In comedies and satyr plays, the actors might also
wear other props, such as enlarged private parts.

Of the more than 1000 known Greek tragedies,
only 32 have survived antiquity.
For some we have papyrus fragments; for
others we have quoted fragments, that is,
other ancient authors quoting from a lost play
(e.g., “As Sophocles said in his Professorikos,
‘Students should listen carefully to their
professor and bring him a nice bottle of cold
beer to every class …’ ”).

The plots of these plays are almost always
from the heroic/mythological age. The plot is
known, but they comment on or are about
contemporary events.

The plots of these plays are also themselves
competitions: between the protagonist and
the antagonist, which is sometimes another
character, sometimes just fate.
agon = competition/struggle

Aeschylus
Aeschylus (525 – 455) is credited with the introduction of
a second actor. Only seven of his 70 to 90 plays survive.
Three of these are part of our only surviving trilogy (the
Oresteia).

The death of Agamemnon, at the hands of
his wife Clytemnestra, after his return from
the Fall of Troy, because of his earlier
sacrifice of their daughter
The revenge killing of Clytemnestra by her
son Orestes.
The hounding of Orestes by the Furies, who
attempt to kill Orestes for murdering his
mother. They are stopped by Athena, who
sets up a law court ordered according to the
principles of reason.
The play ends with the democratic legal
system of Athens being praised as a better
form of justice than the old tribal idea of
revenge (eye for an eye).

Sophocles
Sophocles (497 – 406) introduced a third actor. He wrote
123 plays, only seven of which survive.
Most well known for his Oedipus the King and Antigone,
two of the greatest works in western literature.

Euripides
Euripides (480 – 406) introduced an element of
psychological realism to his plays. He wrote 92 plays, 18
of which survive.
Shocked his Athenian audience with his sympathetic
portrayals of victims and the less powerful, especially
women and slaves.
Sooner would I stand
Three times to face their battles, shield in hand,
Than bear one child!
-- from Medea

Other than in Sparta, the lives of women in Greek poleia
appears rather unenviable.
They lacked political and economic status. Wives and
unmarried daughters were expected to remain indoors in
segregated women’s quarters. Unfortunately, we do not
have a lot of information about women’s lives in ancient
Greece.
From 4th century Athenian legal case:
“We keep hetairai (mistresses) for the sake of pleasure, pallake
(concubines) for the daily care of our bodies, but wives to bear us
legitimate children and be trustworthy guardians of our households.”

However, most Greek tragedies and comedies feature
very strong and independent female characters, so there
is some debate about what life was actually like for
females in the Greek polis.

Oedipus the King
and
Antigone
On blackboard in class

Greek Comedy
Was performed along with tragedies as part of the
Festival of Dionysus.
Developed out of Komos rituals, which were drunken
dances/sex/revelry associated with the God Dionysus.

Aristophanes
Aristophanes (446 – 386) wrote 40 comedies, 11 of which
survive.
Focused on satirizing real personalities and local
Athenian politics (which can make some of the humor hard to
understand for us without footnotes). Lots of sexual or
scatological humor.
Lysistrata
Females in Athens and Sparta go on sex strike in order to end the Peloponnesian War.
Clouds
Satire about Socrates and the professional sophists.
The Frogs
Slaves shown to be smarter, wiser, more rational than their masters and the gods.
The Wasps
Ridicules Athenians’ addiction to law courts and serving in juries.

Peloponnesian War
War fought between Athens and
Sparta from 441 – 404 BCE. Eventually
involved all of Greece.
Ended in Athens defeat, but both sides were
economically devastated and depopulated that
the Greek world of the polis never regained its
prewar level of prosperity and power.
As well, the limited and ritualized style of
Greek warfare was transformed into all-out
total war that lead to large scale atrocities.

“Man is the measure of all things”
Opening fragment to Truth by
Protagoras (490 – 420 BCE)
What does this really mean?
What are its consequences for
philosophy, politics, ethics?
Vitruvian Man
by Leonard do Vinci

Natural Philosophy
Thinking about the natural world.
Many of the most well known are sometimes called the
pre-Socratics (before Socrates)
Thales (623 – 547 BCE)
- argued that everything in nature is explainable via knowable principles
(that is, no need for gods/myths)
Pythagoras (570 – 495)
- Argued that mathematical relationships explain nature. Discovered
Pythagorean Theory and codified our musical octave system.
Hippocrates (460 – 370)
- Creator of the first formal school of clinical medicine. Doctors today
still swear the Hippocratic Oath.
Democritus (460 – 370)
- argued that everything in nature is composed of tiny building blocks
called atoms.
Heraclitus (535 –– 475)
- argued that all of nature is defined by flux/change/evolution.

Sophists
From p
sophia = wisdom.
Teachers who taught their students how to argue
persuasively (i.e., rhetoric).
Tended to argue that one shouldn’t bother trying to
figure out truth; indeed one should be able to argue
persuasively from both sides of an argument.
These were useful skills in the Athenian courts and the
sophists became an important part of democratic life in
the Athens of the 5th century.
Argued that religion/tradition/laws are just expressions
of human power (i.e., institutions created by individuals
and social groups for their own benefit).

Protagoras (490-420)
Influential Athenian sophist who Socrates considered a
dangerous relativist, who taught that good/evil,
truth/falsehood, etc are matters of community and
individual judgment and not universals.

Socrates (469-399)
Athenian thinker opposed to the Sophists.
Strongly believed that there is a higher moral and
intellectual truth that can be discovered by the correct
form/methodology of thinking.
His main concern is the perfection of human character
(moral excellence), achievable when individuals regulate
their life according to objective standards arrived at via
rational reflection.
His method is dialogue or logical discussion between
individuals. The aim is to examine one’s assumptions and
confront inconsistencies, opinions, illogical beliefs.

1. What is courage?
Socratic Dialectic at Work
2. Courage = brave in war
Socrates
3. Courage must be more Some Athenian Dude
than just a virtue for
soldiers
4. Courage = endurance/steadfastness
5. Sometimes prudence tells
us that we should retreat
or withdrawal. 6. Courage = knowledge of future good/evil
7. Can pigs be courageous?
8. No
9. Then courage must be
related to knowledge of
virtue
10. Gosh, Socrates you’re right
11. I don’t know for sure, we all
have so much to learn

Socrates was eventually condemned to death after
Athens's defeat in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta.
He was accused of corrupting the youth, found guilty,
and then poisoned.
Socrates did not write. We know of him mainly via his
student Plato.

Plato (429 – 347 BCE)
Continued Socrates focus on reason and dialectic
method. Plato was from aristocratic class and was highly
critical of democratic institutions, who felt that
democracy is the rule of the mob, the rule of sweet-talking
ignorant demagogues.
Plato believed that a rational political order can be
discovered. The community must be organized so that
individuals can live the good and ethical life.
Unlike Socrates, wrote dialogues. Founded The Academy,
in Athens, sometimes thought of as the first university or
school for young men/adults which lasted for almost
1000 years (385 BCE – 529 CE).
1776 pages!

Plato is writing in the immediate aftermath of the
Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War, during which
Athenian democracy was disgraced, replaced with a
Spartan-supported oligarchy, and then restored, but in a
much weakened state.

Sparta’s (temporary) dominance over the Greek world
came to an end when they were defeated by Thebes in
the Battle of Leuctra (371). The victorious Thebans
freed the Spartan helots, permanently ending Spartan
power in the Greek world.
Thebes’ power was short-lived, however, as the
independence of the Greek polis was ended forever with
the rise of Macedon and the united Greeks defeat by
Philip II and his son Alexander the Great in 338 BCE.

In his most famous work, The Republic,
Plato devise an ideal state in which
different social classes/orders work
together for the good of the whole polis.
Each class performs its assigned task
according to how the soul of its individuals
are organized.
Argues that the soul has three capacities
(reason, spiritedness, desire) and the three
different classes (rulers, soldiers,
producers) are each ruled principally by
one of these capacities.
Rulers/Philosophers – ruled by reason
Warriors – ruled by spirit
Producers– ruled by desire
Rigorous education is required for each
individual to learn their “place”.

Our reading from the Republic is perhaps its most
famous section: the Simile of the Cave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69F7GhASOdM

Many movies have made use of
the epistemological (study of
knowledge) doubt of the cave
analogy.

1300 years later, French philosopher Rene Descartes revisited
Plato’s analogy in his Meditations on First Philosophy, in which
he tried to lay a philosophical foundation of epistemological
certainty for future science.
In the second meditation, Descartes casts doubt on the
reliability of our senses, first in dreams, then in a thought
experiment: what if there is an “evil daemon,” “as clever and
deceitful as he is powerful, who has directed his entire effort to
misleading me,” and who is feeding him misleading sensory
data, giving him the illusion that he has a body that is
experiencing reality.

Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE)
Student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great.
Writings covered an incredible wide range of topics, from
zoology, poetry, ethics, politics, physics, and philosophy.
His views on the natural world were exceptionally
influential later in medieval scholarship.

Like Plato, wrote dialogues, but none have survived.
Almost all of our writings by Aristotle are thought to be
teaching notes, either written by Aristotle or taken down
by his students.
There are references in antiquity by other authors complimenting
Aristotle’s writing for its grace and beauty; nothing that we have appears
to be at all “elegant” or pleasant to read (presumably because they are
just “notes”).

Herodotus and Thucydides
The g beginning g of history y as a y way to p explain the p past (
in
contrast to myths / legends) also dates to this time.
Herodotus ( c. 484–425 BC)
The Histories
Travelled to places and interviewed participants
Story of the past as a moral story for today
Thucydides (c. 460 – c. 395 BC)
The Peloponnesian War
Saw the war as example of larger issues with human
nature and political life.
Interested in find “laws” of human behavior from history
of the past
Still a standard reading in international relations and
sociology

Art and Culture - 04 - Classic Greece

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