The Ancient Greeks For Dummies E-Book

Stephen Batchelor

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 542

Beschreibung

The civilisation of the Ancient Greeks has been immensely influential on the language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, science and arts of Western culture. As well as instigating itself as the birthplace of the Olympics, Ancient Greece is famous for its literature, philosophy, mythology and the beautiful architecture- to which thousands of tourists flock every year. This entertaining guide introduces readers to the amazing world of the Ancient Greeks. It offers a complete rundown of Greek history alongside fascinating insights into daily life in Ancient Greece and a captivating overview of Greek mythology. Readers will discover how this ancient culture came to be the cornerstone of Western civilisation and the enormous influence it has had on our language, politics, education, philosophy, science, arts and sport. * The history of Ancient Greece remains a wide topic of interest, particularly renowned for its influential and diverse culture * This basic guide will allow greater access to this vibrant area of study, and provide a distinct and light-hearted approach to this vast area history * Covers dozens of topics, including; the early civilisations, war & fighting, home & family, day-to-day life and much, much more! About the author Steve Batchelor is a lecturer in Classics at Richmond College and has been teaching ancient history for 10 years. He has written reviews for various publications, including History Today, and he has also been involved in running guided historical tours of Greece.

Leseprobe

The Ancient Greeks For Dummies

by Stephen Batchelor

The Ancient Greeks For Dummies®

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Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, West Sussex, England

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ISBN: 978-0-470-98787-2

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About the Author

Stephen Batchelor has taught Ancient History and Classical Studies for a number of years to a wide variety of student groups and is currently Head of School for Creative and Visual Arts at Mid-Kent College. He has travelled extensively in the Mediterranean and worked there as an archaeological tour guide. He has written book reviews for Current Archaeology and History Today. The Ancient Greeks For Dummies is his first book.

Author’s Acknowledgements

This is my first book and there are several people that I would like to thank: Rachael and the team at Wiley for all their supportive comments and feedback, Dr Neil Faulkner for all his help over the years and his recommendation for this project, both my parents for their continued support, and my partner Samantha for putting up with so many lost weekends while I just did ‘a bit more on the book’.

I’d like to dedicate this book to my father, Alan Batchelor, and thank him for absolutely everything. I know you’ve always preferred the Romans, but this one is for you, Dad.

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

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Contents

Title

Introduction

About This Book

Conventions Used in This Book

How This Book Is Organised

Icons Used in This Book

Where to Go from Here

Part I : Travelling Back in Time

Chapter 1: When, Where, What, Who? Meeting the Ancient Greeks

Understanding Why the Ancient Greeks Matter

Meeting the People of Ancient Greece

Locating Ancient Greece

Clarifying When It All Happened

Talking the Talk: Ancient Greek Language

Chapter 2: Encountering Prehistoric Civilisations: The Minoans and Mycenaeans

Starting at the Beginning: The Minoan Civilisation

Meeting the New Kids on the Block: The Mycenaeans

Chapter 3: Shedding Light on Ancient Greece’s Dark Ages

Surviving the Dorian Invasion

Travelling into a New (Dark) Age

Chapter 4: Governing by Kings, Tyrants, and (Eventually) Democrats

Shaping the New Societies

Surviving the Cycle of Tyranny

Enter Solon: A Man of the People

Bouncing Back to Tyranny

Getting to Know the Spartans

Considering Kleisthenes: The Beginnings of Democracy

Chapter 5: Fighting and Warring: Greece Gets Heavy

Joining the Fight

Living for Killing: The Spartans

Sink or Swim: At War on the Waves

Chapter 6: East versus West: The Persian Wars

Powering Up the Persians

Going the Distance: The Battle of Marathon

Having Another Go: Greece versus Persia II

Heralding the Real Winner: Athens

Part II : Athens to Alexander: The Rise and Fall of Empires

Chapter 7: Athens and Empire Building

Establishing the Delian League: Athens Comes Out on Top

Expanding its Influence: The Delian League Goes into Action

Navigating Athenian Democracy

Examining the Athenian Legal System

Chapter 8: Dealing with the Neighbours from Hell: The Peloponnesian War

Engaging in the First Cold War

Fighting the Main Event: The Second Peloponnesian War

Chapter 9: Losing Their Way: The End of Classical Greece

Weathering Tough Times: Athens

Wrapping Up the Peloponnesian War

Mounting Problems in the Persian Empire

Waging the Corinthian War

Celebrating the Hegemony of Thebes

Chapter 10: Rising Quickly to the Top: Macedonia

Meeting the Macedonians

Taking Over: Philip’s Successes

Enjoying Prosperity at Pella

Taking Over the Family Business: The Rise of Alexander the Great

Squelching the Theban revolt

Chapter 11: Crowning the Undefeated Champion of the World: Alexander the Great

Popping In on the Persian Empire

Spin versus Reality: The Reasons for Invasion

Taking a Surprising Turn: Alexander in Egypt

Hunting Down Darius

Returning to Babylon and Ruling the Empire

Chapter 12: What Happened Next?

Having a Bad Heir Day: Alexander’s Successors

Raising Hell: The Hellenistic Kingdoms

Fading Away: The End of Ancient Greece

Living On: Rome and Beyond

Part III : Living a Greek Life

Chapter 13: Out in the Fields: Farming, Herding, and Travelling

Scratching a Living

Growing Grapes and Making Wine

Getting Around in Ancient Greece

Chapter 14: Home and Family

Appreciating the Household: The Oikos

Spending Time with the Women of Ancient Greece

Marrying and Divorcing

Starting Out in Life: Children

Examining Slavery

Connecting with Alien Life: Metics

Chapter 15: Going About Daily Life in Ancient Greece

Biding Their Time: The Greek Calendar and Clock

Managing Your Money

Dining and Delighting

Drinking It Up

Pondering Sex and the Ancient Greeks

Seeking Medical Assistance

Chapter 16: Plays and Pugilism: Enjoying Ancient Greek Entertainment

Making Art Onstage: Greek Theatre

Getting Physical: Athletics and the Olympic Games

Chapter 17: Depicting Men, Women, and Gods in Art

Defining Greek Art

Surveying Greek Sculpture: Men with No Noses

Inviting the Gods to Dinner: Greek Vase Painting

Finding Beauty Elsewhere: Other Arts and Crafts

Chapter 18: Building Beautiful Greek Architecture

Building for the Masses: Ancient Greek Temples

Constructing Temples

Building More than Temples

Part IV : Mythology, Religion, and Belief

Chapter 19: Going Back to the Beginning: Myths and Gods

Demystifying Myths

Starting Out: Greek Creation Myths

Putting the Gods in Their Place

Meeting the Olympians: X-Rated Deities

Transitioning from Greek to Roman

Chapter 20: Blending Myth and History: Troy, Homer, and Heroes

Separating Myth and History

Passing On – and Pumping Up – the Story of Troy: Homer

Meeting Other, Earlier Heroes

Chapter 21: Practising Everyday Religion: ‘A God Put It in My Heart to Say’

Dying – In Theory and Practice

Worshipping the Gods

Pondering and Predicting the Future

Taking Oaths: ‘I Promise!’

Having Fun with the Gods: Festivals and Cults

Chapter 22: Trying to Figure Everything Out: Greek Philosophy

Making the Case for Philosophy

Meeting the Early Greek Philosophers

Creating the ‘New Philosophy’ with Socrates

Leaving Philosophy to the Professionals: Plato

Meeting the Man Who Knew Everything: Aristotle

Moving On: Hellenistic Science and Beyond

Part V : The Part of Tens

Chapter 23: Ten Great Greek Inventions

Archimedes’s Inventions

The Railway

The Steam Engine

Vending Machines

Writing

History

Comedy

Money

Musical Notation

Democracy

Chapter 24: Ten Things to Read Next

The Iliad: Homer

The Odyssey: Homer

Oedipus the King: Sophocles

The Histories: Herodotus

Parallel Lives: Plutarch

Early Socratic Dialogues: Plato

The Ethics: Aristotle

Frogs: Aristophanes

The Idylls: Theocritus

The Romans For Dummies: Guy de la Bedoyere

Chapter 25: Ten Dodgy Ancient Greek Characters

Alcibiades (451–403 BC)

Odysseus

Pausanias (died circa 450 BC)

Demetrius (336–283 BC)

Theseus

Olympias (circa 370–316 BC)

Alexander the Great (356–323 BC)

Diogenes the Cynic (circa 412–321 BC)

Jason

Kleon of Athens (died 422 BC)

Chapter 26: Ten Great Places to Visit

The British Museum, London

The Acropolis, Athens

Knossos, Crete

Delphi

Olympia

A Greek Play

Samos or Another Greek Island

Google Images

The National Gallery, London

The Agora, Athens

: Further Reading

Introduction

When I think about it, I’ve always been interested in Ancient Greece but I spent a lot of my time not realising that I was. When I was very young I went to Cyprus on holiday and was fascinated by the ruined statues and mosaics. As I grew a little older I loved films like Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans that were endlessly repeated on television at Christmas. What I didn’t understand was the ‘Greekness’ of these things. I knew that I liked the great stories and scary monsters but it was only when I got older that I realised that they were just a tiny part of the fascinating world of the ancient Greeks.

What interested me most was the fact that, despite the gap of over 2,000 years, the world of the ancient Greeks seemed very real and contemporary. They had the same concerns and problems as people do today and went about dealing with them in tremendously imaginative ways. The Greeks were hugely creative and although they lived in a world with a very dominant religion, they never stopped looking for new solutions to age old problems.

About This Book

Studying the ancient Greeks can be a bit frustrating because an awful lot of their story doesn’t take place in Greece but elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The other big frustration is that Greek history isn’t really a continuum. By that I mean that it doesn’t start at Point X and finish at Y. The Greeks were a fractious bunch, always fighting amongst themselves and with other people, so tracing their story can get quite complicated!

It’s worth the effort though. The most wonderful thing about the Greeks is the legacy that they left behind, which you can see, touch, and immerse yourself in. The huge amount of archaeological evidence that still survives is breathtaking. From massive buildings like the Parthenon in Athens to the tiniest coin, each piece of physical evidence reveals something interesting about the way the Greeks lived and what they did.

Another fantastic resource is the huge amount of written evidence that’s survived; plays, poems, works of history, philosophy, science, medicine, and epic poetry that read like the plot of a Hollywood action film have all survived for over 2,000 years. Throughout this book I try to quote as much as possible from these original sources because it’s always best to hear it from the horse’s mouth!

This book introduces you to the world of the ancient Greeks – a world part bizarre, part visionary, and part bloodthirsty. It’s not an attempt to tell you everything about the Greeks; more a way of getting started so that you can carry on exploring their world – and there’s enough to keep you going for the rest of your life!

Conventions Used in This Book

The two main issues when looking at any period of ancient history are language and dates!

The biggest of the two is language. The ancient Greeks used an entirely different alphabet to ours, and consequently the words seem strange and different, although a great many English words come from ancient Greek ones. To try to make things easier throughout the book I put any Greek word in italics. So, for example, when I’m talking about an elected official in ancient Athens I call him an arkhon because that’s the word that the Greeks used.

You might find that in other books some Greek words are spelt differently (often using a c instead of a k) or that the author uses the proper Greek punctuation marks on words. Don’t worry – it’s still the same word but I choose to use the simpler version.

The other issue is using dates. Virtually every date that I use in the book has BC after it, meaning ‘Before Christ’. That’s because the bulk of ancient Greek history took place during the two thousand years or so before the accepted date of Jesus’s birth. (I go into more detail about BC and AD in Chapter 1). Of course, this is our dating system, not the one that the Greeks would have used.

Oh yes, one other thing – places. I mention place names all the time. In most cases you can find the places on the map on the Cheat Sheet at the front of the book. In the case of battles, the Greeks often fought in a big open space like a field or a beach, and they’d avoid fighting near towns if possible. Pinpointing these out-of-the-way places can be really difficult so I try to refer to the town nearest the battle.

Differences of opinion

One of the exciting things about history is that it is always up for debate. Answers are never 100 per cent right or wrong and interpretation (understanding the ‘why’ rather than the ‘when’) is the most important thing. You can probably expect to read some things in this book that seem to disagree with things you’ve read elsewhere. When you’re dealing with events that took place over 2,000 years ago there’ll always be differences of opinion, just as there’ll always be new archaeological discoveries that completely blow older theories away. In a few years’ time whole new schools of thought on many of the issues that this book discusses might emerge. I hope so, because that’s what keeps history fun!

How This Book Is Organised

This book is split into five specific parts, all covering a different aspect of ancient Greece.

Part I: Travelling Back in Time

Part I is all about establishing who the Greeks were and where they came from, which isn’t quite as straightforward as you might think – even the Greeks weren’t sure! Modern historians have established that the really ancient Minoan and Mycenaean cultures were the forerunners of the ancient Greeks and I look at them in Chapter 2. After that comes the story of how the Greeks came into being and spread all over the Mediterranean. I also look at how they developed into such amazing warriors. It was just as well they did because the last chapter in Part I focuses on the wars with the Persian Empire when it seemed as if ancient Greece might actually be wiped out.

Part II: Athens to Alexander: The Rise and Fall of Empires

Part II is a fantastic rollercoaster of a story! It looks at the period of greatest Greek success following the Persian Wars and how the city of Athens became so wealthy and dominant. However, after a difficult period a new power emerged in the north: Macedonia. Under Alexander the Great the Macedonians went on tremendous military campaigns and built up an empire that stretched as far as India. This didn’t last either, as after Alexander’s death the empire broke up and new kingdoms emerged. The last chapter in this part deals with how the kingdoms fought amongst themselves until they all finally succumbed to the threat of the Romans. Ancient Greece was effectively at an end.

Part III: Living a Greek Life

So what was being an ancient Greek actually like? Part III looks at life in the towns and cities of ancient Greece from the food they ate to what sort of exercises people did at the gym, to what happened when people got divorced. I include specific chapters on theatre, art, architecture, and what life was like in the countryside.

Part IV: Mythology, Religion, and Belief

One of the things that people find most interesting about the ancient Greeks is the world of mythology. The stories about gods, heroes, and monsters were dominant themes throughout Greek life, influencing their plays, literature, and art. Religion was a major part of public life, full of strange and bizarre rituals. Part IV is all about these themes with a focus on how the Greeks lived their lives surrounded by these ideas and based a lot of what they did on examples from mythology.

This part ends with a look at the Greek philosophers, the men who challenged these beliefs in gods and monsters, and set out to make sense of the world using their own powers of logic and reason. They were an odd bunch but their ideas are fascinating!

Part V: The Part of Tens

This final part has four brief chapters intended to give you an idea of where to go next to further your experience of the ancient Greeks. I include chapters on places to go and books to read. Chapter 23 is all about Greek inventions – you’ll be surprised at some of the things that the Greeks came up with but they’re all true, promise! Chapter 25 is about interesting but slightly dodgy characters; the people in history who are worth a second look and a revaluation.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout the book I use a series of icons to capture your attention. I hope they’re as useful to the reader as they were to the writer!

As much as possible I try to use bits of what the Greeks actually said. Reading something first-hand is fascinating and the huge amount of writing that survives from Ancient Greece makes this easy to do.

Just like urban myths today, a lot of ‘facts’ about ancient Greece aren’t actually true. Occasionally I point them out with this icon.

This icon pinpoints important information to bear in mind when getting to grips with the ancient Greeks.

Some of the stories from ancient Greece are like the plots of Hollywood films and increasingly they are being made into them. This icon means that I’m referencing a film you may want to check out.

Sometimes I include information that’s interesting but not vital. This icon highlights more complicated stuff that you can skip over if you want to.

Where to Go from Here

You can start at the beginning so that you have the historical context before you start looking at how the Greeks lived their lives. Alternatively, you can start with Part IV, all about religion and mythology and where the Greeks considered that they came from. This is just as important to understand as the historical background.

Each chapter in the book is written around a specific topic so you can really dive in anywhere. If you want to know about Alexander the Great, go to Chapter 11. If Greek drama is your thing then Chapter 16 is the one for you. I include cross-references in the chapters so if something comes up that’s mentioned in more detail elsewhere, you’re directed to it.

Whichever way you choose to enjoy the book, I hope you find it fun and interesting.

Part I

Travelling Back in Time

In this part . . .

S o who were the Greeks? Well, it isn’t as obvious as you might think. In this part I look at where the Greeks came from and what made them Greek. I go on to look at how these people spread out all across the Mediterranean until the Greeks were living as far away as modern Spain and Turkey.

Oh yes, and I also consider the Minotaur, human sacrifice, and huge battles with the Persians . . .

Chapter 1

When, Where, What, Who? Meeting the Ancient Greeks

In This Chapter

Exploring the land and sea of ancient Greece

Organising ancient Greek history

Writing and reading ancient Greek

Modern Greece is very different to the Greece of the ancient world.

Today, Greece is a medium sized member of the European Union that uses the euro as its currency. To the north-east it’s bordered by Macedonia and to the north-west Albania. Most people think of it as a popular tourist destination, and during the summer months people from around the world flock to the seaside resorts on the mainland and on islands like Crete and Rhodes.