Chapter 3: The Greek Experiment
Chapter Summary
It would be difficult to deny the importance of ancient Greece upon the history of the West. We moderns seem to "find ourselves" in ancient Greece -- their democracy, philosophy, science an literature all seem to be much more modern than they are ancient. But such a judgment doe say more about ourselves than it does the ancient Greeks. What is often forgotten is that ancient Greece developed under heavy Near Eastern influence from the days of the Mycenaeans through the tumultuous aftermath of Alexander's empire. The appearance of the Greeks serves nonetheless as a watershed in the development of western civilizations. From them we have borrowed the values of human dignity, rational thought, participatory government and the creative powers of the human mind.
Our best guide to early Greece is, of course, the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. It was Homer who portrayed the values of Greek civilization in their starkest form and from Homer we can identify their obsession with the cultivation of virtue. A citizen who cultivated virtue would result in a virtuous city-state which, in many ways, was a Greek or Hellenic ideal. Although the path to virtue was difficult, it was the Greeks who made the quest a human quest.
Although the Hellenic world was little more than a collection of semi-independent city states, two of these poleis have always deserved attention. On the Peloponnesus, the Spartans created a society led by a dual monarchy organized for war. The Athenians, who inhabited the Attic peninsula, created a democratic form of government based on the direct participation of all citizens. Both poleis became powerful and by the end of the 5th century, tensions between them had resulted in a "cold war," a war which became hot during the Peloponnesian War. In the wake of that war, Athens was destroyed and Sparta became the hegemonic force in the Hellenic world.
Despite the clear fact that the 5th century began and ended with war, this century, the Classical or Hellenic Age, has always been considered to be something of a Golden Age as well. In the wake of Persian defeat, Pericles rebuilt the city of Athens. At the same time, Greek dramatists like Sophocles an Euripides gave the West the tragedy. Herodotus and Thucydides wrote their histories and the Sophists could be found on the streets of the agora "selling" their wisdom. And then there was Socrates who, in 399, was sentenced to death for challenging anyone to defend their beliefs. He drank the fatal dose of hemlock, but not before urging subsequent generations of people to question everything, for "the unexamined life is not worth living."
Profound as the Greek achievement certainly was, we cannot forget that slavery and the subjection of women were Hellenic commonplaces. Greece remained a militant and intolerant society. Just the same, they were the first to develop the concept of eleutheria (freedom) and they certainly elevated the primacy of the human intellect. The Greeks made a lasting impact on western civilizations and none was perhaps more important than the concept of paideia -- the concept of becoming a total person, something Socrates understood when he asked us, above all, to "know thyself.
Section Menu
Chapter 
Organize
Learn
Connect
Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.
Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.