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‘swift-footed Achilles’, ‘unharvested sea’, ‘cloud-gathering Zeus’, and so on. Such phrases, known in modern scholarship as formulae, are not only frequent, they are systematic. If the poet says that Achilles is doing something and wants him to occupy five syllables at the end of a line, he calls him ‘noble Achilles’. If he wants him to occupy seven syllables, he calls him ‘swift-footed Achilles’.
Although scholars continue to disagree, we can now say with fair confidence that the Iliad as we know it is essentially the creation of a single mind, using traditional material, and that it was composed at the point of contact with writing.
One among a number of heroic legends was the Troy story; it told that Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam, abducted Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta, and that to recover her an alliance commanded by Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, besieged Troy and destroyed it.
The Iliad (‘Tale of Troy’) tells of an incident within this Trojan War. The Odyssey looks back on the war, and relates the subsequent adventures of one of its heroes.
The Greeks have always called themselves Hellenes; the Romans, for some reason, called them Graeci, and Greeks they have been to most of the world ever since.
Homer never calls the besieging side Hellenes: they are Achaeans, or alternatively Argives or Danaans.
the Odyssey’s first word declares its subject to be a man, but the Iliad announces its subject not as Achilles but as Achilles’ wrath.
The Odyssey is set ten years after the Trojan War. Odysseus has not returned home: the goddess Calypso has imprisoned him on a remote island, while his palace on his own island of Ithaca is occupied by local nobles, suitors for the hand of his wife Penelope. He has also incurred the enmity of Poseidon, god of the sea, for blinding his son, the cannibal giant Polyphemus. Zeus decrees that Calypso must let Odysseus go. Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, leaves Ithaca in search of his father. Odysseus is shipwrecked, but makes landfall on the land of the Phaeacians, where he is found by the princess
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Another example is the motif known by the Latin phrase deus ex machina, ‘the god from the device’; it was a favourite resource of Euripides, and perhaps his invention; at all events, it was a development originating at some time in the fifth century, not a convention long established. The ‘device’ or ‘machine’ seems to have been a kind of crane supporting a platform which could be swung out into the view of the audience.
Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind;
History-writing, as it has been practised in the west for two and a half thousand years, was invented with remarkable speed by two men, Herodotus and Thucydides.
Little is known about Herodotus’ life. He came from Halicarnassus on the eastern seaboard of the Aegean (modern Bodrum), within the Persian empire. Probably he was born in the 480s or a little later and died in the 420s.
The Greek word historia originally meant simply ‘enquiry’; that is what Herodotus means by it.
‘appointment at Samarra’ (a man in Baghdad sees Death give him a threatening look, and flees as far as he can, to Samarra; Death later explains that his look was not of threat but surprise: ‘I had not expected to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra’).
On one view this period, in Athens especially, was the zenith of Greek civilization and everything after was decline.
oratory and philosophy reached the greatest heights in the fourth century.
Athens was defeated but the Spartans did not choose to destroy it; the city revived, and democracy was actually more widespread among Greek states in the fourth century than before. It was the rise of Macedon and the extinction of the Greek city-states’ independence by Philip II and his son Alexander the Great that changed everything and led on to the successor kingdoms into which the lands conquered by Alexander split after his death.
The third and second centuries were also to be the period at which Greek science, mathematics and scholarship became most vigorous and creative.
But his finest oration is one that he wrote, untypically, to speak himself. An attack on the oligarch who had killed his brother, it is eloquently plain and powerful. It ends tersely, with five successive verbs: ‘Enough prosecution. You-have-heard, you-have-seen, you-have-suffered, you-have-him. Judge.’
There is a notion that the world is divided into Platonists and Aristotelians: that, in Coleridge’s words, ‘they are the two classes of men next to which it is almost impossible to conceive a third’.
it was Plato’s idea that understanding should come from the interplay of minds and personalities; his works are dialogues, and he never expresses any view in his own person. In most of them Socrates is the principal speaker, but in a few, probably late, he takes a lesser part, and in the Laws he does not appear at all, the chief role being taken by an ‘Athenian stranger’.
The Apology (Apologia) purports to be the speech that Socrates gave in his defence when on trial for his life in 399.
In Meno he presents the strange doctrine of ‘anamnesis’: that we existed before we were born, and that we retain knowledge from that previous existence. He does this by having Socrates question Meno’s slave.
death of Alexander in 323 BC and the victory of the future emperor Augustus over Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31. With Alexander dead, his vast empire split into ‘successor kingdoms’, of which the most important, from a literary point of view, was Egypt, which was ruled by a Macedonian dynasty of kings all called Ptolemy until the last ruler, Cleopatra. On her death in 30, Egypt became part of the Roman empire, suffering the fate which the other successor kingdoms and the few surviving city-states had already met, and the last of Greek independence was extinguished.
Alexandria, the capital of the Ptolemys, became a centre of intellectual energy in the third century. The kings founded a library, the most famous in the ancient world, and the Museum (‘place of the Muses’) – not a museum in the modern sense but a kind of literary research institute.
Eratosthenes, appointed head of the library in the later part of the century, was the greatest polymath of his time, a literary scholar, philosopher, geographer, poet and mathematician. He calculated th...
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water plashes, cicadas chatter, frogs croak, finches sing, doves moan, bees hum.
sobriquet
They were right at least in this, that almost everything that matters most in Greek literature was radically innovative. Latin literature, however, was written beneath the looming presence of the Greek achievement,
For the first time an entire culture was modelled on another, and a whole literature imitated forms and themes that had been created in an alien tongue.
An original achievement of the Romans was to invent imitation.
Unable to accept the whole package offered by any of the main philosophical schools, he decided in the end that he was an Academic – the natural outcome for a man in this position, since the Academics maintained a moderate scepticism: their view was that in the absence of certainty, we must make do with probability.
ne plus ultra
This can be seen from the very first word. The Iliad had begun ‘Wrath’, the Odyssey ‘Man’, Virgil ‘Arms and-the-man’, Lucan ‘Wars’. Statius begins ‘Fraternal battle’.
