It’s All Greek to Me

The following has been excerpted from the introductory lecture in a course I have taught at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies on the literature and philosophy of the ancient Greeks…

 

Homer’s two epics, the Iliad and Odyssey, are not only the earliest works in the European canon; but along with Plato’s dialogues and the Judaeo-Christian Bible, they represent the common foundational matrix out of which the entire intellectual and literary tradition of the West has emerged.  All of European literature is in a sense a protracted sequel to Homer’s Trojan theme; and Western philosophical speculation might aptly be described as a mere by-product of the commentaries on Homer that continued to be written in every generation in the West for two and a half millennia after the death of the Ionian Bard.

Until relatively recently in the history of the West, no person—at least no person with any pretension to civilization, culture, or basic humanity–would have been permitted to leave primary school without knowing Homer’s epics more intimately than any other written text, with the possible exception of the Bible.

That this is no longer the case was brought home to me rather dramatically a few years ago, when after an introductory lecture on the long narrative tradition of continuations of Homer’s Trojan theme (from Virgil’s Aeneid through the medieval Romans de Troie, Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and countless other works right down to James Joyce’s Ulysses)–the whole “matter of Troy”, as it was called in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance–, one remarkably inattentive undergraduate put up his hand and inquired, “So, who is this Troy fellow and what is the matter with him?”

Now, this, undoubtedly, was a bright young man.  After all, he had made it into one of Canada’s elite universities, no doubt with a 99.9% average from his local campus of Self-Esteem High.  Indeed, in a later class, nearer the end of the academic year, he demonstrated an impressive ability to recall the details of several episodes of “Homer Simpson” (no doubt his preferred Homer).  But from these and other depressing facts, it seems obvious that a familiarity with Homer and the other ancient poets and thinkers is all the more urgent in our own age of cultural vapidity, modern triumphalist amnesia, and soul-less technological self-absorption.

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For the rest of the afternoon, I am obliged to try to provide some perfunctory historical background:  for the Greeks in general, and more particularly, for Homer’s epics.  Along the way, what I hope to persuade you of—if you aren’t already persuaded–, is the singular vastness, magnificence, and enduring relevance of the ancient Greek accomplishment.

Civilization is, first of all, a much older thing than most give it credit for.  Leaving the Egyptians and Sumerians aside, if we trace the origins of ancient Greece to the Minoan civilization that first flourished on the island of Crete in about 2000 B.C., then the Graeco-Roman epoch in itself lasted for two and a half millennia:  that is, five hundred years longer than the Christian era has endured so far—assuming that it is not already dead.

It’s useful, when thinking about what we lump together under the label of “classical antiquity”, to remember that the great Greek historian and moral essayist Plutarch, for example, writing in the late 1^st and early 2^nd  century A.D., was as far removed in time from the first Greek historian—if you can call Homer an historian–as we are from the Crusades.  Homer himself was as far removed from the events of the Trojan War as we are from the Elizabethans.  And when in 321 A.D., Constantine moved the centre of his great Empire from Rome to the so-called “new” capital of Byzantium on the Bosphorus at the entrance to the Black Sea, that remote eastern outpost had already been a thriving Greek city for a thousand years.  This should give you some sense of the immense scope, both geographical and chronological, of Greek civilization, and of the folly of regarding it either as a monolithic phenomenon or a merely adolescent stage in the development of our gloriously enlightened modern era.

 

From our present perspectives, the vast panorama of civilization is all too violently foreshortened, with even minor events and personalities in the recent foreground coming into clear and detailed focus, and assuming a disproportionate significance thereby, while major and complex developments that elapsed over the course of centuries and millennia get flattened and compressed out of all recognition.  I can’t help but observe, for instance, that most Canadian students are intimate with every detail of Mr. Trudeau’s sacred charter of rights and freedoms, while knowing little if anything about Magna Carta and certainly never having heard of the great Athenian lawgivers Solon, Cleisthenes, or Pericles, whose constitutions laid the foundation for the earliest and so far longest-lasting democracy in history, as well as for an eruption of intellectual, artistic, and literary genius that has yet to be equaled in any historical period since.

The fact that, within the course of three generations, the architect-sculptors Polycleitus, Pheidias, and Praxiteles, the philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the poets Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, came together in Athens, a city barely the size of Whitby, is probably one of those very few phenomena that truly deserves that otherwise ditzy contemporary adjective “awesome”.  In truth, the entire Greek cultural epoch from the age of Homer to the fall of Rome is pretty much one extended miracle of religious, philosophical, literary, and artistic fecundity.

 

The sheer brilliance and beauty of the classical achievement should be a good enough reason to make the study of the ancients the centerpiece of every civilized person’s higher education, as it used to be until a mere 75 years ago.  Another reason, of course, should be no less obvious:  that the European and North American democracies in which we now live were founded, metaphorically, but also literally, in ancient Athens and Jerusalem; that is, virtually all of our social and political institutions, our notions of human rights and freedoms, of the rule of law, of justice and equality before the law, are derived from two principal sources:  classical antiquity and the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition.

So too, by the way, derives our penchant for self-examination and criticism.  It remains an irony that escapes the most vociferous critics of Western civilization today—those dismal acolytes of cultural Marxism, deconstructionism, radical feminism, environmentalism, anti-colonialism, occupyism, or (fascist) anti-fascism, who have nonetheless achieved a veritable hegemony (to use their own buzzword) in the academy of late–that they could only have been produced, and tolerated, by the Western culture they so despise.

 

But what applies to our social and political institutions, applies even more forcefully to our cultural ones:  to the intellectual and imaginative spheres of religion, philosophy, literature, and art.  To understand, or appreciate in any judicious sense, the modern forms which these products of the human mind and soul have taken is patently impossible without some grounding in the literature and thought of the ancients.

To demonstrate this point, I have sometimes played a little parlour game with my undergraduates in which I challenge them to come up with a single department of knowledge, artistic motive or style, literary genre or theme, religious symbol or archetype, or philosophical idea or topic, of any value or longevity in the history of the West, that did not originate or coalesce amongst the ancient Greeks.

If you think about, you’ll see that there is hardly anything in our culture that does not come from them:  physics, biology, medicine, engineering, mathematics, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, idealism, cynicism, sophistry, logic, rhetoric, dialectic, politics, tyranny, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, democracy, philanthropy, poetry (epic, lyric, and dramatic), tragedy, comedy, history, music, architecture, and so on:  these are all, in fact, Greek words for disciplines, institutions, arts, and sciences that were either invented or perfected in the intellectual and cultural laboratories of ancient Hellas.

This is a parlour game, therefore, that I have never lost; and while one cannot blame the Greeks for rap music, the ROM crystal, or the apparently unkillable celebrity of Paris Hilton, remember my stipulation that it be of lasting value.  (Come to think of it, it is at least suggestive that Paris Hilton shares her first name with that of Paris, legendary prince of Troy, that similarly effete, brainless, and idle son of the aristocracy, whose lust for fame and superficial beauty caused the global disaster known as the Trojan War.)

 

Only a few generations ago, as I’ve already indicated—and the sermon will end shortly–, everybody, no matter what his or her eventual field of academic specialization or occupation in the world, was obliged, usually for at least a year, to “read classics” at university.   Indeed, reading classics was not so much a prerequisite as an educational ritual, a rite de passage.  To be counted an educated person in the fullest sense of the word, students were expected to know Homer and Virgil, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch, and so on, whom they usually read in their original Greek and Latin, and whose study was accepted by them as fundamental to their basic cultural literacy:  to their claim to be a full heir to, and member of the enlightened civilization of, the West.

In those innocent days before all of Western civilization was abominated as a breeding-ground of racism, sexism, and environmental rapine, the importance of the classics was held to be more or less self-evident.  Because the Trojan Horse and Hecuba’s tears; because Orpheus’ beguiling music and Ariadne’s life-saving thread; because Heracleitus’ doctrine of the conversion of everything into its opposite, Plato’s World of Ideas, Aristotle’s Golden Mean, and the Stoics’ “law of nature”; because the temptation by the Sirens’ Song, the predicament of being between Scylla and Charybdis, the burden of performing Herculean labours, the experience of the sympathetic emotion called by Aristotle “catharsis”; because straining to hear Pythagoras’ music of the spheres, having an Achilles’ heel or a tragic flaw, suffering morally from a Narcissus or psychologically from an Oedipus complex, deciding with Caesar that the moment is right to cross the Rubicon or with Penelope to continue to weave and undo one’s web—because all of these themes and ideas have been reiterated again and again as expressive of the perennial human condition, and have been part of the human conversation for three thousand years, they constitute the very grammar of our culture.   Not to know them is to be incapable of understanding the language spoken in one’s own home; indeed, to willingly disinherit oneself of one’s own cultural and intellectual birthright.