Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

A substantial proportion of Plutarch’s works are not biographies but essays on moral, literary, and even personal themes:

Plutarch, who knew as much about Epicureanism and Stoicism as about the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions in which he had been trained, believed in the practical application to human problems of classical ethics. His works have a philosophical purpose—the ethical edification of readers.

On Containing Anger.

On Praising Oneself Inoffensively about the contexts in which it is acceptable to praise oneself (for example, when being treated unjustly) and devices that can ameliorate the impression of immodesty.

Among Plutarch’s essays, the one that most effectively combines a serious message with entertainment value is his Gryllus. This examines the nature of human society through the staging of a pseudo-Platonic debate between Odysseus, Circe, and Gryllus (“Grunter”), who has been transformed into a pig and does not want to be changed back into a man. Gryllus argues that he is correct in preferring his present existence. He achieves an impressive def...

female humans. Animals are more temperate and do not desire material possessions; animals have no need for perfumes; animals do not commit adultery deceptively; animals do not have sex except in order to procreate; they therefore avoid sexual perversions. Animals stick to simple diets, have the right amount of intelligence for their natural conditions of life and therefore must be credited with rationality. The life of the animal as defined by Gryllus resembles the life of an ascetic philosopher. Plutarch here entices the ...

Josephus, whose full name was Titus Flavius Josephus (AD 37–c. 100), a Jersualem-born Aramaic-speaking

speaking Jew. But Josephus could never have written his seminal Jewish Antiquities without immersion in the Greek curriculum. His first book, The Jewish War, describes the Jewish revolt against the Romans in AD 66–73, in which he had led soldiers in Galilee.

They discussed whether they had the right to commit suicide: Josephus, ultimately the sole survivor, proposed that each kill the other in turn. He came out last in the drawing of lots and negotiated his fate with the Romans. He then turned his back, to a certain extent, on his own people, and was appointed Vespasian’s interpreter. When Vespasian became emperor two years later, he freed his Jewish protégé, who promptly adopted Roman citizenship.

writer Lion Feuchtwanger drew on Josephus’s writings in his trilogy Josephus, The Jews of Rome, and The Day Will Come, first published in German between 1932 and 1942. These historical novels played a crucial role in alerting the world to anti-Semitism.

Greek remained the unchallenged language of all the dominant philosophical schools. It was also the language in which all our best sources on ancient medicine and the subjective experience of disease under the empire were composed. The most vivid insights into the minds of all the inhabitants of the Roman Empire were produced by the great celebrities who wrote in Greek. Their thoughts have had an incalculable impact on cultural and intellectual life since the Renaissance and still influence us today. Hellenism was so powerful precisely because it “was a medium not necessarily antithetical to local or indigenous traditions. On the contrary, it provided a new and more eloquent way of giving voice to them.”

This chapter brings down the curtain on the dramatic two-millennia-long chronicle of the pagan Greeks by looking at some of their responses, from the first to the late fourth centuries AD, to the strange new religion practiced by the early Christians—

Although the Christian converts of Thessalonica could not yet have known it, Paul’s mission heralded the end of the glittering pagan Greek world.

But the relationship between Hellenism and Christianity can’t be fully understood without a brief retrospective detour into the three centuries before the birth of Jesus, to Ptolemy I. He had ruled over both centers of the Jewish religion, in Egypt (Alexandria) and Palestine (Jerusalem). Under the dynasty he founded, Greeks in Alexandria were tolerant of Jews, and vice versa; it was in the third century BC that the labor of the translation of the Old Testament into Greek, the Septuagint, commenced. Jewish thinkers such as Aristoboulos even argued that the Greek philosophical pioneers Pythagoras and Plato had borrowed all their ideas from the Law of Moses. Jewish poets even converted biblical stories into delightful Greek tragic meters.

Affairs in Jerusalem were never so harmonious, but it was only when the city passed into the hands of the Seleucid Antiochus IV in 175 BC that antagonism between Jerusalem’s Jews and Hellenes erupted. Exploiting tension among J...

Antiochus entered Jerusalem. He looted the temple, enslaved women and children, and set about destroying the Jewish religion to impose the Greek one instead. The first book of Maccabees describes Jewish despair when he introduced idols of the heathen gods, ordered the sacrifice of pigs, and banned the Sabbath. The circumcision of baby boys was outlawed, and the threatened penalty was death. The reaction of the heroic Jewish resistance army, led b...

When Jesus was alive and preaching, Jews in his homeland were therefore antipathetic to Greek thought, while between the Jews and Greeks of Alexandria, for the most part, there was mutual tolerance and even admiration. After Jesus’s death, the Jews in Jerusalem and Alexandria who had converted to Christianity could not agree upon whether they were supposed to be converting Gentiles, including Greeks, or just Jews. But Paul had no doubts at all. The enterprising apostle knew what would please a Greek audience: According to the Acts of the Apostles, he quoted from Greek poetry, and even alluded to Aeschylus’s Eumenides when he addressed the Athenians at the Areopagus, where Aeschylus’s Orestes had sought justice in the play (Acts 17). Paul’s experience in Athens, whether historical o...

The collection of documents we know as the New Testament, however, had begun life at around the same time that Paul visited Ephesus in the first century AD. In around AD 61, a Jew who had become a Christian wrote the account of the life, ministry, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, which we know as the Gospel according to Mark. Although the author of this extraordinary document may have had access to a compilation of the sayings of Jesus in a Semitic language, the language he wrote in himself was the everyday Greek spoken across all of the eastern Roman Empire. By the end of the first century, all the texts comprising the New Testament, including the letters of Paul, had been written and had begun to be collected. By AD 170, the four gospels are mentioned together; with the introduction of the codex, far more texts could be assembled than had been possible previously in rolls. The Bible in a single huge book, including the whole of the

Old and New Testaments, became a physical reality by the mid-fourth century.

The Gospels and the Acts underpinned the spread of Christianity in the second century, when it ceased to be dominated by Jerusalem and was taken all over the Roman world, including Greece and the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, by proselytizing bishops. Over the course of the four centuries between the birth of Jesus and Theodosius’s edicts, the relationship between Christianity and Hellenism was varied and constantly evolving,

intellectually impoverished.

the religion of the Jews, which is to be condemned because it insists on their separateness from other peoples.

He was not the Messiah because he was betrayed by his own followers. He could not save himself from death and did not arise from the dead. If he had, he would have displayed himself to the judges rather than to a half-demented female acolyte. Returning to his own pagan, philosophical voice, Celsus argues that Christianity is itself is contrary to reason. This can be seen by Christians’ use of terrifying images of punishments in the future to intimidate people into conversion. Celsus particularly objects to the attraction of Christianity to self-professed sinners, and its claim that it can absolve sin. Like the good Greek philosopher he is, Celsus is clear that the only remedial course of action for someone who habitually sins is to try to change his whole attitude to life. When it comes to God, why would the supreme being want to become flesh and mingle with mortals, who are inferior? To undermine the whole background of the new Messianic faith, Celsus then launched a broadside against the beliefs of the Jews. Today it is an unpleasantly intolerant diatribe to read, but it reveals his intimate grasp of the Old Testament. He saves his most acerbic rhetoric for the doctrine of the resurrection of the body:

They are irrational to suppose that when God, like a cook, introduces the fire that is to devour the world, all the rest of the human race will be incinerated, and only they will survive—not only the ones who are

alive at the time but also those who have been dead for a long time, who they suppose will rise from the earth with exactly the same flesh as when they were alive. This would be a good thing for worms to hope would happen, but what ki...

Diocletian’s persecutions, he wrote a treatise called Against the Christians. Its exposure of what he perceived as their intellectual confusion was so deadly

that it was later banned by the Christian emperors from Constantine onward and has been almost totally lost.

Plotinus’s student Porphyry wrote the most dazzling allegory of the Odyssey of all in his treatise On the Cave of the Nymphs, which begins by quoting the description of the Ithacan cave in book 13 of the Odyssey, where Athena tells Odysseus to hide his goods. This cave is an allegory, according to Porphyry, of the physical universe—it is lovely but it is also murky. The olive tree represents the divine wisdom that informs the universe and yet is separate from it. When Athena tells Odysseus to hide his goods in the cave, Homer is saying that we need to lay aside our outward possessions in order to think about how to cut away all the destructive sensual desires and passions of the soul.