A Literary History of Greece

Robert Flaceliere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351534994
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: Literature

There are several good histories of Greek literature of various shapes and sizes, but the purpose of this book is not simply to consider the literature of ancient Greece as an isolated subject, treating each of the literary modes - epic, lyric, drama, history, philosophy, and rhetoric - in terms of its own evolution. Instead, Robert Flaceliere provides a Greek history that deals with all the important works of Hellenic literature that are still of interest to contemporary readers; and he does this in chronological order with an accurate account of their historical background.Flaceliere follows the history of Greece down through the centuries as the writer records it. He describes the political atmosphere in the nation and the advances in the other arts that influenced literature. The author understands Sappho's rhapsodies; girlish love in the context of the acceptance of homosexuality in that era. He sympathizes with the unrequited passion of the penniless Archilochos. He appreciates Pindar's pacifist tendencies, Herodotus' upright insistence on truth, and Euripides' doubts about the existence of the gods. For the classical centuries, so rich in talent and genius, the author follows the successive generations systematically so as to distinguish the special features of each, what it owes to the preceding generation and how it paves the way for the next.Since this is a literary history, attention is mainly focused on the writers and their works, but by displaying these in their political, social, artistic and scientific setting, Flaceliere gives a better understanding of the production and significance of these wonderful achievements of the human spirit. Due to the wide range of material presented, "A Literary History of Greece" can be used as a reference book as well as for enjoyment reading.

1

The Trojan War: Homer

No one in Troy had a harder burden to bear … ill-starred couple that we are, tormented by heaven to figure in the songs of people yet unborn.

(HELEN: Iliad VI, 357–8)

Historical Background

Even if Helen’s beauty was not its only cause, and though Homer’s account of it may not be completely reliable, the Trojan war did nevertheless take place. It is an historical fact, which was later magnified and enriched by legend.

The names ‘Greece’ and ‘Greeks’ are comparatively late and were only used from Roman times onwards. In the classical age the Greeks referred to themselves as Hellenes, the people of Hellas. But at the time of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey the Hellenes were as yet no more than a tribe in southern Thessaly, subjects of Achilles, also known as the Myrmidons. When Homer wants to refer to all the various peoples who took part in the expedition against Troy under the leadership of the Atreidae, he uses three names: Achaeans, Argives or Danaans. Here we shall use the first as being the most comprehensive.

In the widest sense, it is true, Homer’s Achaeans were already Greeks. They spoke an archaic Greek dialect of which we now possess specimens in a syllabic, not yet alphabetic, script, that is inscribed on tablets of clay found by archaeologists at Cnossos in Crete, at Mycenae in Argolis and at Pylos in Messenia; that is to say, in the capitals of Idomeneus, Agamemnon and Nestor. The fact that we are able to read these tablets today is due to the brilliant discovery of an Englishman, Michael Ventris, who in 1953 succeeded in deciphering this writing, which consists of some eighty signs.

If an historical epoch is defined as that for which we have written and comprehensible documents, Ventris may be said to have ‘promoted’ the Achaeans as Champollion did the ancient Egyptians: he transformed them from a prehistoric to an historic people. Unfortunately the texts inscribed on these clay tablets are little more than inventories and accounts, enough only to whet our appetite. Nevertheless it is possible to derive some information from them, particularly about the system of land ownership and the social organization of the Achaeans. But it is for the history of the Greek language that these tablets are of capital importance: before they had been deciphered, the history of Greek began with the Iliad, composed perhaps about 800 B.C., and the language spoken by the Achaeans in 1200 B.C. was completely unknown to us. Now we have scientific confirmation that the heroes of Homer spoke an archaic form of Greek which we can study and compare in detail with that of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

I cannot resist adding my own tribute to the Greek language: clear, supple and musical, it took shape for literary purposes in the service of poetry, yet was able to adapt itself effortlessly to the eloquence of Demosthenes or the philosophical thought of Plato; a tongue fluid as a spring, melodious as a song, yet thanks to its particles as strictly organized as a temple built of highly polished and precisely laid blocks of stone.

Linguistically it belongs to the Indo-European group like Sanskrit, Latin, the Germanic languages and most of those spoken in Europe today. The words for ‘father’ and ‘mother’, for example, are to be found in almost identical form in all these languages. There can be no doubt that all the peoples speaking one or other of the dialects belonging to this group originated in the far distant past, perhaps the fourth millennium B.C., from the same stock and probably inhabited the region which today corresponds to southern Russia and central Europe.

The Achaeans were not the first inhabitants of Greece. They succeeded a people called by the Greeks of the classical period Pelasgi, of whom little is known and who were certainly not Indo-Europeans. Indeed the Achaeans adopted certain Pelasgian words such as labyrinthos and thalassa and others with similar endings which can be shown by the methods of comparative linguistics not to be of Indo-European origin.

Since thalassa means ‘sea’, it would seem probable that before their arrival in Greece the Achaeans had spent so long in some inland country remote from the sea that through lack of use they had forgotten the word for it in their own language and therefore borrowed the Pelasgian word thalassa. As for the word labyrinthos, it suggests a connection with the labyrinth of Daedalus at Cnossos from which the hero Theseus escaped alive and victorious, thanks to the ball of thread given to him by his mistress Ariadne—and therefore with Crete. This large island played an important part in human history, especially from about 2500 to 1400 B.C. Admirably situated for receiving influences from Europe, Asia and Africa and re-transmitting them, it was also the seat of a great indigenous civilization, known either as Minoan after Minos the legendary king of Crete, or as Aegean because thanks to his powerful fleet Minos succeeded in extending his sway over most of the islands of the Aegean Sea.

Then, at some date still in dispute, though almost certainly in the second half of the fifteenth century, the Achaeans, who had also built themselves a navy, landed in Crete and captured Cnossos. Yet in defeat Crete triumphed over her savage conquerors, in the same way that later Greece, after defeat by the Romans, was to mould and educate the victorious ‘barbarians’. The uncouth Achaeans finding the Cretan civilization, something of which was already known to them from earlier raids, superior to their own adopted it and were assimilated by it. Thus was born the civilization that we call either Achaean or Mycenaean from Mycenae, the royal town of Agamemnon, where the finest relics of the heroic age were later to be found. In the Iliad the Cretan Idomeneus is a vassal of Agamemnon, whereas in the legend of Theseus it is Minos who imposes a tribute on the Athenians: this is explained by the fact that in the interval the Achaean conquest of Crete had led to a reversal of roles.

Eventually the Achaean expansion turned eastwards, especially towards Cyprus and Asia Minor where it was brought to a halt by the town of Troy, also known as Ilium, whose inhabitants were possibly related by blood to the Achaeans. The geographical position of Troy made her the queen of the Hellespont or Dardanelles, the only entrance to the sea of Marmora, the Bosphorus and the rich and fertile shores of the Black Sea. The strategic and commercial importance of this wealthy city, whose treasures held promise of valuable loot, was enough to make it the chosen target of the Achaeans. Since the casus belli proclaimed by the aggressor is seldom the true underlying reason for war, whether the rape of an Achaean princess, sister-in-law of the king of Mycenae, by one of Priam’s young sons was a fact, used by Agamemnon as a diplomatic pretext, or whether it was purely legendary, will never be known, though the second hypothesis seems the more likely.

The Trojan War—a long and monotonous siege, a ‘phoney war’ with occasional skirmishes—lasted for ten years and was only brought to an end by the crude strategy of the wooden horse. According to the traditional chronology of the great Alexandrian scholar Eratosthenes, the town was taken in 1183, though certain modern historians date it a century earlier in 1280. The archaeologists who excavated the ruins of Troy on the mound of Hissarlik discovered there the superimposed remains of several successive towns, one of which was the city of Priam.

The expedition against Troy was the last major undertaking of the Achaeans, whose victory was swiftly followed by decline. On his return to Mycenae, Agamemnon found that he had been supplanted, and he died beneath the axe.

The Minoan civilization of the Cretans and the Mycenaean civilization of the Achaeans both belong to the Bronze Age: though the use of iron was not completely unknown, it was then a rarer and more precious metal than copper. The decline of the Achaeans was completed, in Greece, by new invaders from the North, the Dorians, who were also Hellenes. According to legend, this was the ‘return of the Heracleidae’, for the leaders of the Dorians were the sons of the great hero Heracles who like Theseus belonged to the generation before the Trojan war. These invaders brought with them iron as the metal in everyday use.

Under pressure from the Dorians, many of the Achaeans embarked once more and reached the shores of Asia Minor; no longer in search of new conquests, but hoping to find a place there alongside the earlier emigrants. There in Ionia and Aeolis the memory of the great Achaean heroes was preserved for centuries; their exploits were recounted, embroidered with all the magic of reminiscence, and the minstrels, the aoidoi, put these stories of war and glory into verse. Thus was born the Greek epic.

One of these minstrels who may have been born at Smyrna and lived at Chios at some undetermined date, which I personally would place between 850 and 750, more than three centuries after the fall of Troy, was a poet of genius. It was he who had the idea of isolating from the huge cycle of epics relating to Ilium and treating separately two episodes that seemed to offer subjects of outstanding significance, the wrath of Achilles and the return of Odysseus. According to ancient tradition, this poet was Homer.

Minoan Art

In order to appreciate fully the character of the civilization described in the Iliad and the Odyssey, we are today fortunate enough to be able to visit the ruins of Cretan palaces and Achaean citadels as well as the museums at Cnossos and Athens. Certainly such a visit is the best introduction to the reading of the Homeric poems.

The palace of Cnossos, excavated—and very considerably reconstructed—by Sir Arthur Evans, astounds us by its huge dimensions and the splendour of its ornamentation. Its bold and complex plan, which freely replaces walls by large bays framed by supporting columns, furnishes a succession of dark passages and rooms suddenly lit up by ‘wells of light’. This architecture, very different from that of classical Greece, may well have aroused in the minds of the Hellenes the idea of the ‘labyrinth’. Columns of painted wood, tapering downwards, with plinths and capitals, support richly carved porticos. The so-called ‘Queen’s bathroom’ bears witness to the comfort enjoyed by the inhabitants of the palace (since the word Homer uses for ‘bath’, asaminthos, has the same ending as labyrinthos it is of pre-Hellenic origin). The throne room is decorated with painted frescoes representing, against a field of flowers, griffins crouched in heraldic attitudes. Other well-known frescoes represent the ‘Prince with the Fleur-de-Lys’, the ‘Vase-Bearer’ and the ‘Parisienne’, so called because of her arch and expressive features. The Minoan women, as may be seen from the terra-cotta figurines of priestesses that have been preserved, wore flounced, bell-shaped skirts, leaving the breast freely exposed: a type of dress radically different from that of the Greeks of the classical period.

Many other palaces have been discovered in Crete, at Mallia, Phaestos and Hagia Triada. A magnificent sarcophagos from Hagia Triada, painted on all four sides, depicts scenes from the funeral rites: the making ready of a sacrifice on a tomb, the ghost of the dead man. The work of the Cretan jewellers and goldsmiths is even more superb than that of the painters; necklaces, pendants and jewels of all kinds, chased and ornamented ceremonial swords, and drinking vessels. The golden goblets found at Vapheio in Laconia were made by Cretan craftsmen and their repoussé decoration showing men capturing wild bulls is quite amazing.

The memory of these Minoan splendours is preserved in the Iliad. In the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ there are references to Crete and ‘its hundred cities’, and elsewhere to Minos, the son of Zeus, who after his death was considered worthy of becoming one of the judges in Hades. In Book XVIII, the poet describes the marvellous shield that the lame Hephaestus made for Achilles:

Next the god depicted a dancing-floor like the one that Daedalus designed in the spacious town of Cnossos for Ariadne of the lovely locks. Youths and marriageable maidens were dancing on it with their hands on one another’s wrists … (XVIII, 590–4).

According to tradition, Daedalus of Athens had been the architect of the labyrinth, that is to say of the palace, of Minos. Though it had been destroyed six centuries earlier, one might almost imagine that Homer had actually visited it, so closely do the palaces of Circe and of Odysseus in Ithaca resemble those that have been revealed by excavations in Crete. But it is above all in Books VII and VIII of the Odyssey where he describes those peaceful seafarers and prosperous traders, the Phaeacians, that the poet seems to have been inspired by memories of the Minoan civilization. When Odysseus beholds the splendour of the palace of Alcinous he is overwhelmed:

His heart was filled with misgivings and he hesitated before setting foot on the bronze threshold. For a kind of radiance like that of the sun or moon lit up the high-roofed halls of the great king. Walls of bronze, topped with blue enamel tiles, ran round to left and right from the threshold to the back of the court. The interior of the well-built mansion was guarded by golden doors hung on posts of silver which sprang from the bronze threshold (VII, 82–7).

The life of continual feasting, to the accompaniment of music and dancing, led by the Phaeacian king and queen amongst their nobles, evokes the kind of luxury that must have existed at the Minoan court. And it is also to the fashions of the Cretans that the poet looks when he wants to describe the elegance of the Olympian goddesses. In Book XIV of the Iliad, when Hera is getting herself ready to seduce her husband Zeus in order to distract his attention from the Trojan battlefield, she pays particular attention to her toilet:

With this [oil] she rubbed her lovely skin: and then she combed her hair, and with her own hands plaited her shining locks and let them fall in their divine beauty from her immortal head. Next she put on a fragrant robe of delicate material, that Athena with her skilful hands had made for her and lavishly embroidered. She fastened it over her breast with golden clasps and, at her waist, with a girdle from which a hundred tassles hung. In the pierced lobes of her ears she fixed two ear-rings, each a thing of lambent beauty with its cluster of three drops (XIV, 175–83).

These locks and golden clasps and heavy ear-rings were part of the armoury of feminine coquetry in the time of Minos—and also, it is true, in Achaean times.

Mycenaean Art

Long before 1900, when Evans began to investigate the ruins of Cnossos, Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German business man who had conceived a passion for Homer, had attacked the site at Troy; later in Argolis, he turned his attention to the acropolis of Mycenae, Agamemnon’s capital (1876) and the acropolis of Tiryns (1884). Schliemann was the great pioneer of archaeological excavation.

In contrast to the Cretan palaces, the dwellings of the Achaean chieftains were real fortresses, smaller in size and comparable to the castles of our own Middle Ages. Moreover, the social organization of this period was of an essentially feudal type: Achilles was one of the great vassals under the suzerainty of Agamemnon.

The citadel of Tiryns was surrounded by an outer wall, built of great blocks of stone with little or no bonding. Impressed by the vast size of these ramparts, the Greeks of the classical period described them as ‘cyclopean’, as though they could only have been constructed by creatures with the superhuman stature and strength of the Cyclops. The system of defence was completed by galleries, casemates and posterns. Entering by a deep portico and courtyard, one reached the vestibule, beyond which was the great hall, or megaron, almost square, with a central hearth between four columns that supported the roof, in which was a kind of louvre to let out the smoke. The rude Achaean masters of this fortified manor employed artists who, if not actually from Crete, must have been trained in the Minoan school, for at Tiryns some splendid frescoes were discovered, representing a boar hunt, two women in a chariot, and a woman carrying a chest and dressed in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. THE TROJAN WAR: HOMER
• 2. THE ARCHAIC PERIOD
• 3. TOWARDS DEMOCRACY
• 4. THE TRIUMPH OF DEMOCRACY
• 5. IMPERIALISM AND THE DECLINE OF ATHENS
• 6. LAST STRUGGLES FOR FREEDOM
• 7. THE HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN PERIOD
• 8. CONCLUSION