História da Grécia Antiga #4 com Donald Kagan, de Yale

last time I was talking to you about the uh the world of Homer from the side of uh you might say the life the of the Mind rather than practical matters of society I'm talking about values and ethics in the world of Homer and I spoke to you about the heroic ethic which is excuse me the dominant element in this system of their uh another way of looking at it is that it is an aristocratic way of thinking and feeling at the core of it is the concept of a a r t now that's a

word that causes us some problems because it comes to mean in even in Antiquity it comes to mean something quite different different and especially if uh you're talking about Christianity which adopts the word as well where it comes to mean goodness goodness in a kind of a Christian sense well erase all of those ideas from your head when you think about the world of Homer and I would say the world of Greece uh in the period we're studying it AR derives from the Greek word anir which means man man as a opposed to Woman these

are the masculine qualities as the Greeks saw them and primary among them was the idea of Courage physical courage moral courage mental courage M mainly courage in battle is the most core aspect of this word this idea which comes to spread and and to be much more encompassing than that um the idea I guess the most neutral way to translate the word is Excellence prowess the ability to do something or to be something which is admired uh in the fullest way possible some of the desired qualities some of the examples of R are courage as

I've said but also Beauty strength the ability to perform Athletics very well but also to speak very well and it is one of the extraordinary things I think for modern people to see uh there are really sort of two Central heroes in the poems of Homer Achilles the great central figure of the Iliad who represents physical courage strength power Beauty speed all of those things Odus the herir of the Odyssey but present and very important in both poems he has also got all of these things but the thing that sets him apart that makes him

the special kind of hero he is is his skill in speech which doesn't mean only that he pronounces words very well or that he selects them very very well for beauty or something but rather that he is enormously clever that he can use speech to achieve practical ends just as he uses strength and power and all those other things and the Greeks Regard in the Homer's World seem to regard one just about as well as they do the other Odus is the man the wife Odus as Homer calls him the man of many devices all

of those things are are great uh and they are equally honored along with the physical courage that is so characteristic of these guys and the recognition of that those qualities the recognition of the arai that these Heroes Have is what their lives are all about first of all they have to have these qualities it's not enough they must be recognized by the people among whom they lived by the communities in which they live and the highest rewards that individuals can have is the recognition of their fellow men of their very very high qualities we are

talking about um a society therefore the anthropologists have come up with I think a useful distinction uh societies based on shame as opposed to those that practice guilt guilt is something very internal and personal shame is something very external and public and how you are treated and greeted uh is what makes your worth and so it is from the beginning a society in which the community is a critical element may be the critical element an individual who didn't live in a society could not achieve the kinds of glory and fame and recognition that you expect

from a hero and all of these heroes are Aristocrats in the traditional sense of the word they arrive at their High standing in their Community by virtue of birth you are born to be one of these people because your father was such a person belonging to the right families and so on the noble families of Greece just and we see it already in Homer typically claim dissent from some God or other and ordinary people do not have that ability the family and the individual are the critical elements a larger Community meaning your entire Village your

entire city your entire region that is barely mentioned that is not talked about again think about Achilles when he refuses to do what he's supposed to what he's uh to fight with the Greeks because he's had to fight with Agamemnon nobody says wait a minute that's treason you can't do that you've been signed up by your city or by this Expedition to fight and you got to fight nobody says that what they say is oh please we need you Achilles you mustn't do this but nobody says uh arrest that man he has uh broken his

uh debt he's not performing his death to the community everybody knows all those heroes are there because they want to be and they want to be there so that they can earn both the uh uh the wealth that can be taken from from a defeated City but even more important the kind of Fame and Glory that comes with such deeds and you are I've already told you the story about Achilles having the choice of uh living Forever Without fame or dying with Fame and he makes the choice for death and fame that I think is

very critical that attitude that point of view even after the world of Homer is gone remains a very powerful INF influence on the Greeks throughout the rest of their history so that you have built into that Society an inherent conflict after all even these Heroes need communities in which to live for all the various purposes that human beings do so you would think they have to have some allegiance to them they do but they also have an allegiance to their families and to themselves which in Homer tend to predominate and yet there is a sense

in which there the conflict is very real if you look at the problem in Homer uh Achilles when he withdraws and refuses to fight for the Army nobody's can tell him to do otherwise he has a right to do that but that means that something is wrong and it's very clear that he has been overcome by rage and he is not behaving in the sensible way that even a Greek hero is supposed to and he is not brought back to normal to a position in which people can say yes well you're a great hero and

you're not out of your mind because when that happens when he gives up his rage and he allows you remember Prime to bury his son Hector something he would have refused to do in his rage so that even Achilles has got to come to terms with the community know nors in order to be living in a proper life and this conflict between his family and private desires and needs and those of the community will be characteristic very strongly of the Greek way of life for the rest of its history not always in precisely the same

form but it will be there competition again is rearing its head uh it's another form of competition the competition between these two sources of value the community at large versus the individual and the U family and this kind of tension which doesn't make it clear the rules are not absolute not everybody fits into a pigeon hole it is not easy to say what is the right thing what is the wrong thing all of that creates confusion problems but also uh you know conflict tension competition all those things but it also creates a degree of Freedom

which doesn't permit the typical despotic kind of culture which characterizes almost all of the human experiences that we know in the early history of the human race so there is uh I want to turn now to the way in which this way of thinking had an impact on the future uh and of course I'm speaking about the the future of the of Western Civilization which was the heir to this tradition I mentioned to you already last time that in a way the uh the poems are a kind of a Bible it is the source of

all knowledge and wisdom that anybody who knows anything knows and um and how they were used for practical purposes as when the Spartans made a decision about who owns salamis based on what it said in the ilad but it's also Al important to realize how those poems inspired the imagination of Greeks for the rest of their history another fact is that we are told that when Alexander the Great went out to conquer the Persian Empire and as far as he was concerned to conquer everything he could reach he carried with him a copy of The

Iliad which it is alleged he put under his pillow this is a problem when you consider that books in those days would not likely to be codexes codices as they are today but uh Scrolls that took up quite a lot of space I don't know quite how Alex managed it but that's what they say but the principle is established it was clear he was another Achilles in his own eyes and it was for him to achieve the great Deeds that uh I have been mentioning now if you look at the story of Western Civilization it

Prov provides a very interesting contrast within it and uh the I'm sorry I the the Greek experience that I'm talking about now based upon what you see in Homer provides a contrast with and a competition to the other great tradition of Western Civilization which is the judeo-christian tradition and I just want to make a few small points to indicate how that works The Iliad begins at the first first word in The Iliad is the accusative now Manan it's wrath anger I am singing about the Wrath the anger of Achilles which brought so many men to

their Doom is what Homer says the first thing is the emotion of an individual man The Odyssey begins even more strikingly with the word Andra the accusative of anir the the accusative case of a man and he says Sing to Me goddess about that man that man of many devices that that clever man Odus the anid of Virgil based of course on the ilot in the Odyssey begins arao I sing of arms and the man the man enas now that's what are the Greeks talking about I'm talking about individual men extraordinary men and the events

that emerge from them and the life they lead but let's look at our Bible begins this will be news to most of you in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth and it it um the book goes right on to talk about God what he does sometimes why he does it what is the effect of what he does but the center of our book is God not man and there's some it's not just an accident that reveals the characteristic of each one of these cultures the Greeks had a humanistic outlook on life they

believed in the Gods they were religious people but the core of their lives was shaped by things human in a way different from what was true of the Hebrews and the Christians later on um versus a Divine view the secular approach is very very Greek versus a religious approach the Greek View moreover presupposes that man lives in society he is not a creature off by himself by definition he necessarily lives in society he is conceivable to the Greeks only in a society The Iliad which is about a war immediately is a kind of an artificial

Society put together for the purpose of defeating the Trojans and taking their City uh as I've sex suggested to you the values that are the most important are Community Values that is to say uh the the reward of good behavior is the admiration and the honor that a hero gets and the most serious punishment he can suffer is to be shamed in front of that Community uh Aristotle lay writing late in the Greek tradition but still powerfully influenced by these kinds of ideas speaks about man as a the Greek words are a politicon z and

I think the best way to understand it is to think of it as meaning man is a creature who lives in a polus in a city state in a Greek kind of a city state and and and in the same general passage he says a man who is by nature without a polus is either more or less than a man and what he means by that is if a man is superior to the polus doesn't need a polus he is a God because men need a polus and if he is beneath the polus it means

he's beneath what it is to be a human being and that that tells you just how potent is this concept of the community uh for the Greeks and it emerges in in its own way from The Iliad and the Odyssey Odus also was offered an opportunity to live forever when he was uh Shipwrecked on the island uh in which the goddess Calypso ruled she fell in love with odyss this is the fate of great Heroes they are heroic and handsome and fast and women love them and uh uh she says just stay with me and

I you will live live forever and all will be well and uh he says well you're very beautiful girl and I enjoy you a lot but uh I got to go back to Ithaca now why does he have to go back to Ithaca well he has a wife he whom he loves Penelope and he has a son whom he has barely seen because he had to go off the Troy almost 20 years ago uh to fight that battle and he hasn't been home SI since those are very powerful pulls that we easily do understand but

it's also true that he is the king in itha and when he returns to Ithaca he immediately moves into a position of honor and respect which is a critical part of his own sense of himself of the of what he needs to be what he wants to be and so uh and I always think it's very very interesting to we don't don't have an American society we don't have an ilot in Odyssey we don't have our own Bible but I think uh Mark Twain's Huck Finn is really very very revealing to see what is so

different about us in the modern times from the homeric world Huck is uh when when things don't go right for Huck what does he do he lights out and wants to get away from society he wants wants to go wandering and exploring and on his way almost and as an individual rejecting Society fleeing for his individualism and that tradition as you all know what how many examples can we think of it of works that uh really project the greatness of being all by yourself and away from people and away from society that's where Good Things

Are the Greeks would have thought you were out of your mind they or that you were some kind of a barbarian but that's okay people have never known Civil Society people have never known a world of polus well of course they would do something stupid like that but I think that's an interesting contrast and let me carry on with this by talking about the views of society which are characteristic of the two traditions in western civilization what do we see in the Bible when God decides to invent man he places him in the Garden of

Eden the Garden of Eden contains first of all just Adam and then when God decides for his own reasons uh that he needs a companion he invents one other companion Eve and where they live is Paradise one man one woman that's all you need it's great nothing could ever be so good well what happens they are transgress um Eve persuade persuaded by the serpent then persuades Adam to do what was forbidden by God what is forbidden by God it is to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge because if a human beings obtain knowledge

they will be like the god and that is unacceptable so when you do that you have to be punished what is punishment to be thrown out of Eden to be thrown out of this isolated condition of perfection but what does Perfection mean you don't have to work you can eat without doing anything about it you don't seem to do much of anything which is fine everything is quiet peaceful no problems no action that's Paradise a Greek would go crazy at the thought it is a pre-social a pre-political life life in society which then is what

Adam and Eve have to encounter they now have to form Villages cities start living among each other and so on that is the punishment for the sin of seeking knowledge of Good and Evil and therefore of uh straining for divinity man the message I think is must know his place which is humble and not close to Divine his hope rests simply with God not with himself when he tries to take things into his own hands and in the process to contravene the will of God only terrible things can happen to him it's very interesting I

think that in the 18th century rouso who himself seems to me to have been uh kind of like a poison apple in the history of the human race oddly revives that biblical view if you think about it his view is man was happy and good before the invention of society which society corrupts man and takes away from him his happiness uh what we need to do is to undo the evils that organized Society have done and if only we removed all of the bad things created by Society man would return to his naturally perfect virtuous

self which is of course a major source of individualism which is uh this Great Western force and the nihilism that I think inevitably emerges from from it I think you know people have in different ways found in rouso the root both of a nichan nihilism and of Marx and I think there is powerful uh reason to do so because you can go uh in either one of those directions once you start making this uh kind of assumption for the Greeks on the other hand as I've said political Society was essential for living any kind of

a good life in the uh Odyssey you remember uh Odus finds himself uh on the island of the cyclopes those oneeyed monsters and um what is it about them that make them so monstrous so inhuman from the perspective of the homeric heroes and here's the line that Homer writes they live without the word is the Greek word is nomoy which we would translate uh as laws but before they become laws they are the customary Norms of society in other words civilization they live without nooy and they wreck not of one another that is to say

each family lives by itself they have nothing to do with each other they do not have a community they do not have a society so they are of course sort of prehistoric monsters as far as uh the Greeks are concerned now the judeo-christian story as I think of it by the way the word story is a translation or I mean it means the same thing as the Greek word muthos our word myth a myth in this sense as the Greeks it's just a tale it can be true it can be false uh and so on

anyway the judeo-christian story says in the beginning men were innocent innocent was the same as ignorant because knowledge gets in the way of their innocence and they have Solitude living in Paradise what destroys their happy permanent condition is the sin of Pride and the consequence of that sin is uh Society corruption pain and death because they knew neither of these uh neither pain nor death while they were in Eden salvation is available and with it immortality but it comes from God and it doesn't come in the world in which we live but in some other

world to be achieved in the future that I think is a very thumbnail sketch of the judeo-christian story The Greek story is is quite different War be is right at the center of it and War itself requires political and social organization there can be fighting without War but there can be no war without an organization that makes it something more than just plain fighting it requires political and social organization the search for honor and Glory are at the root of why men fight uh and why they do many many other things in their lives according

to this view the Greeks did have a notion that in a way resembles some of the things I've said about the judeo-christian story they had a concept called hubis h y b r i s to be translated as something but among these terms excess arrogance violence I think the fullest grasp of it I think might be rendered best by violent arrogance some notion of being above yourself and thinking yourself more than a man with the implication that you are approaching some kind of divinity by being more than a man and acting accordingly which usually requires

that you use violence to achieve what you want and the the sort of the stand picture in Greek ethics runs this way a man is uh granted too much he is too well off he is too rich he is too strong he's too beautiful so much so that he becomes uh too arrogant and is ready to Step Beyond his human condition at that point the gods don't like it because like the the judeo-christian god they want to have some bount between the two but for them it's very important because it's not so the boundary is

far from clear so what happens to the man who has uh too much he is Afflicted with the hubis which leads him to take the violent action onto the scene comes the goddess at at which might be translated moral blindness in other words he no longer can think straight and so he will do something dangerous harmful and very uh ultimately bad for for himself and when he does whatever it is he is struck by Nemesis the goddess of Retribution well of course the most famous Greek case I think of these things is in Sophocles play

edius the King which illustrates it perfectly well edus is a brilliant man he achieves the kingship of his City because of his extraordinar extraordinary intelligence and he's a very good man he is King don't imagine that he's a despot anything but the people love him he saved the city thanks to his Brilliance and his good will however after a while he comes to be too satisfied too comfortable with his own Brilliance and when another threat comes to the city he is confident that he can solve the problem again for his people he's warned by the

gods through Sears and by men of wisdom saying don't don't don't investigate this question too far he might be making a mistake he won't listen he Bulls ahead and uh he discovers in the process the terrible terrible truth which is that uh by accident by coincidence not by intent but that as a young man he killed his father and subsequently married his mother and this most horrible uh combinations of facts drives him uh he's already suffering Ed from the hus and the at and the retribution is terrible in his what to say in his Madness

when he discovers that he tears out his own eyes blinds himself and of course now for the rest of his life he must just go about as a kind of a beggar having been this form tremendously great king so these are examples of what happens in in Greek ethics later on uh if you are guilty of this characteristic on the other hand when he even edus himself when he understands and he relents and in a sense he apologizes for what he's done but more importantly he ceases of course to be powerful and to act in

that way wisdom comes to him he understands he has acted immoderately that is the critical concept moderation is this wonderfully great important thing for the Greeks you must act in moderation don't be they don't ask you to just be humble and throw yourself on the ground and consider yourself as nothing compared to the god or the gods be a man be proud of what you should be proud of but don't go beyond limit of what is human because if you do terrible things will come seek Fame we all want that and I'll say more about

that but uh you can't push it too far there has to be uh some kind of reasonable human limit to what you do so here is this problem typically Greek problem where there is a contradiction that you got to live with you can't resolve you as if you want to seek the fullness of a human experience you have to try to be the best possible man the greatest possible man to compete successfully against others and to achieve fame glory and recognition for what you've achieved but if you push it too far you will anger the

gods and something terrible will happen to you so it seems to me that Western Civilization ever since has been a composite of these two Traditions but there is no way to put them together and so Western Civilization is an ambiguous Society with a war always ranging within the soul of Western Civilization uh and it's never perfectly clear which of the two approaches to life uh is the better one I don't know whether any of you have ever thought about this in anything like this way but if you contemplate your own uh way of thinking about

what you what are you supposed to be doing with your life I think you'll find some combination If you're sort of typical uh but that combination doesn't ever have to be 5050 and I'm sure very rarely is more typically one aspect of the culture dominates rather than the other U but the shift in place and time and in many I would say throughout most human beings there is a consciousness of the both they both have some attraction and one has to Grapple with them so the part of you wants to become the greatest whatever it

is that you want to become and you wouldn't be here if you weren't very competitive and very eager to come out first uh devoted to AR in your own version of that kind of thing and yet it's very easy to say to you that's not a good thing to do that's what you should try to do is to be humble you should be like uh what Jesus suggests uh in The Sermon on the Mount uh there's your soul is in deep danger if you indeed continue to lead the life that you have mainly been leading

up to now and those two things are in conflict I don't care if you ever go to church that is no longer confined to a religious uh organization those are Key Parts float around in western civilization all the time there are aspects of uh demand for performance at the highest level and at the same time as there's a great deal of blaming people for pursuing such things instead of humility that's Western Civilization friends and the Greeks uh are at the root of the whole thing so now let me turn to my next uh topic which

is to leave the world of Homer behind us and to begin to tell the story of how it was that the characteristic U unit of Greek civilization the polus came into being out of the Dark Ages uh we've said a little bit about let me say a little bit first of all about the way Scholars have categorized uh the history of Greece typically we speak of the bronze Bronze Age The Myan period and so on followed by the Dark Ages but after that you start having refine terms which are derive actually excuse me from the

world of the history of Art and that is because in the Dark Ages we don't have any writing so if you want to designate anything it has to be by uh tangible things like Pottery particularly painted Pottery when you have it because it's easier to categorize and it's from that that most of our terms show up so for instance you will see uh references to words like Proto geometric post they'll be sort of postan then Proto geometric these would be the very earliest kinds of pots that have geometric designs on them then comes the geometric

period and uh the orientalizing period all of these refer to Pottery Styles uh but there is uh you then next come to a a larger period which is referred to as the Archaic Period archaic visavi The Classical period which is this start was the central subject of people's interest in the Greeks to begin with and later on they studied its surrounding periods this Archaic Period is roughly speaking about 750 BC to 500 BC why this period as a unit what makes it a unit well it's around 750 a a great number of the changes that

move the Greeks away from the Dark Age kind of society to the fullscale polus begin and 500 because really I would have said if you were being more a little bit more precise you would say something like uh well no even 500 isn't really bad because if you think about the Persian Wars as being the breaking point before the Persian Wars you're in the Archaic Period after the Persian Wars you're in The Classical period Well the Persian Wars begin in 499 BC when myus uh starts the ionian Rebellion so that's that's really I think the

reason for the dating during this Archaic Period some of the things that happen are these the isolation of the Greek towns in the Dark Age gives way increasingly to contact with the East and the South when I say the South I really mean Egypt h and all around the Eastern Egan sea uh the rise of the polus is based upon critical economic military social and political changes all of which produce a world that's really strikingly different from the one that was just before it I suppose the first apparently historical event that we know something about

is the the first Olympic Games which according to Greek tradition were held in 776 BC the Precision of that of course is not to be taken seriously but it gives you a general idea of when we are talking about and uh the fact this is what's interesting about that is the the Olympic games like all of the panh helenic games it was the first of the panh helenic games was not a local event just for one polus and maybe for a couple it was one to which all the people who thought of themselves as Helen

which we would call Greeks uh took part in so that meant the concept that there is something that all of us are have in common that make us all Helen now exists it's not there in Homer so that's one thing then literacy returns to the Greek world it is as I told you before not a development of the m Ian script uh which we saw but rather a new writing system a true alphabet most of the symbols were borrowed from a kind of a of a Semitic language and a Semitic alphabet that came from uh

Phoenicia I would have guessed or some place near it I think I mentioned to you that the Greeks uh improved upon it made it a true Alphabet by taking some signs that they didn't need for their own language and turning them into vowel signs you know if you read a uh well a good example of that kind of Semitic script is Hebrew if you read Biblical Hebrew you have to supply the vowels yourself you have to know where the vowels are supposed to go but from here and that makes it harder to learn how to

read well when you have the vowel sounds it's easier and the Greeks made that contribution um in one of Plato's lesser known dialogues he makes a statement the following statement which I think shows both the typical arrogance of the Greeks and also says something true he says the Greeks never invented anything but everything they borrowed they improved upon um I think they probably also invented a few things but it was very very characteristic of the Greeks to borrow from the cultures they encountered and to adapt them to make them more useful for their own purposes

and nothing could be clear than that the alphabet is uh an example of that henceforth we will see writing in Greece now very very little of it and of course what we have is confined to things that are not perishable these would have been inscriptions either on Pottery which the earliest ones are or on Stone but but otherwise I'm sure there was writing on perishable material wooden plaques uh I probably not yet paper but but these would have been destroyed so what we have is on the pottery we know that the Greeks established the first

the first colony of which we know the Greeks that the Greek Greeks did establish it was uh in the Bay of Naples on the island of isia they established a colony somewhere in the 750s and soon afterwards there is a colony established on the east coast of Sicily at what we call Syracuse now and a rash of others so that the Greeks are in the 750s engaged in spreading themselves from the mainland of Greece and from the aan in general even so far out west as Italy and Sicily and soon we know they are in

touch with just about every place in the Mediterranean Sea in the same period there is clearcut unmistakable Oriental influence on Greek pottery and other things that they make what Oriental that means mainly the uh Tigris and Euphrates Mesopotamia Syria all those older civilizations and more much more advanced civilizations than the Greek Greeks are in touch with them again and they borrow Styles copy Styles maybe they in the early days maybe they uh used some of the Craftsmen from out there or maybe they just their own Craftsman picked it up but however that may be no

question about it contact interaction influence most of the influence I suspect was going one way in those days from the more advanced civilizations of the East to the Greeks the Greeks are doing doing a lot of learning borrowing and adopting and of course this is the period in which the homeric epics are finally written down now that there is writing and that gives them I think even greater impact on the Greek world in the future all of these things are happening about the same time as there is a also happening a major fundamental change in

farming Commerce and warfare which will have very significant political consequences as well but I want to postpone that story for a little while let me then just turn to this phenomenon that is the polus the polus is the word polus appears in Homer as early as Homer when it means something different from what it means uh throughout most of Greek history it just means a physical place and what it appears to be is the Citadel The Fortress that was the center of the towns that grew up after the Bronze Age after the collapse of the

Myan world so that's how it is in Homer later definitions however will be expansive and Broad and as you go further and deeper into Greek history the claims become greater and greater uh Aristotle in his politics of course tells us the most on this subject and often he is our source of information but one thing is clear and pretty early the polus is not merely a city state in the same way as let us say the Mesopotamian city states of the third millennium BC were places like or orish towns that we know back there th

those places were simply the place where the king or the emperor ruled the place where the main God's uh Palace was uh the place where the bureaucrats were to do their business that's that's what it was no more than that but immediately very early you start hearing the Greeks talk about the polus in terms that are more in your mind than in in the in your church six Century Greek poet named alus wrote not houses finely roofed or the stone of walls wellb built no not canals or dockyards make the polus but men able to

use their opportunity and uh if to get into the fifth century late in the fifth century through cities in his history has one of his uh generals speak to his men and say men are the polus so we need to straighten out for ourselves what does that mean uh does that mean that the place where these people live is not the polus is it only men uh well we'll come back to that let me read you something as we move to the fullest claims that will be made for the role of the Polish Aristotle in

the politics he says this as man is the best of the animals when perfected so he is the worst of all when he is divided away from Law And Justice but he tells us human Justice can be found only in the polus because he says man is by nature a politicon zoan an animal of the polit and as I told you a man who is without a polus by nature is above or below the category of man it's because man alone has the faculty of speech and the ability to distinguish good from bad and right

from wrong while he is born with weapons for the use of wisdom and virtue he may use them for the opposite ends therefore when he is without virtue man is the most Savage of animals Justice on the other hand is an element of the polus the administration of justice which means deciding what is just is the regulation of the partnership which is the polus man can't live without the polus Justice exists only in the polus the polus is something more than a place it's more than the walls it's more than the ships it's it is

some kind of a thing that is spiritual it seems to me what about the size of this thing oh let me back up there's something else I wanted to say um to indicate this notion of men being the polus as opposed to anything tangible um when the Persians conquered the Greek cities of Asia Minor when they came to the coastal city of fosa the F fans had a choice of either giving bread and water to the great king and becoming subjects of the Persians all it would have meant would they would have had to pay

taxes and do military service for the king he didn't go about killing people he conquered they chose instead to take their city which is to say all the people in the city put them on ships sail to the Far West and organize a new city out there and in fact they landed uh on the Riviera in France and did pretty well for themselves afterwards um but that's a beautiful example they thought they had taken their polers with them because they had moved the entire city there uh during the the Persian Wars when theistic is trying

to convince his fellow Greeks to stay and fight at salamis but they are reluctant to do so she says okay if you won't stay and fight at uh salus well all our men are already located on our ships we will take these ships sail them away to Italy and settle in Athens in Italy well the Spartans take them very seriously and they say okay we'll stay and fight at salus so such a concept was a possibility it's not the whole story though let me turn to the question of the physical picture that you ought to

have of a polus remember there is that Citadel standing on a high hill the Acropolis as it's called the polus up high there is surrounding Farmland going as far typically as there is either a natural or an artificial Frontier typically a mountain range will be the boundary between the area of two poles or a stretch of water because Greece has the sea winding through it everywhere uh but when that's not true then there is a typical sort of modern front a a land bridge which then aine is a theoretical line is drawn through it and

on one side is one city and the other side is another city there's a wonderful archaeological discovery of a boundary Stone uh up in the near Athens uh which on which is written on one side this is Athens it is not megaa on the other side it says this is me it is not Athens so there is that kind of a boundary as well and that is a place where trouble is likely to emerge Greeks will once the poce are in place they will spend a great deal of time fighting each other a normal reason

for fighting is a dispute about a piece of land that is more or less on the boundary between them and so that's one aspect of their world what about about how big are these things answer from the 20th century America very small I think the word tiny might be justifi we start with the most abnormal of them in this respect the largest polus of which we know it's Athens unlike many uh Poes Athens had been successful in gaining the city of Athens itself have been successful in gaining control of the whole region which it dominated

the region of eteka so that anybody by the time history Dawns anybody who lives in the peninsula that is ATA is an Athenian even if he lives in a village or a good-sized town 60 miles away he is still an Athenian he can be a citizen of his community he can be a marathon but he's also and more primarily uh he is an Athenian now Atta was is in fact approximately a, square miles which I'm told is about the size of Rhode Island and that's the biggest polus of which we know um there are well

over a thousand poce some people want to push the number at its height up to maybe 1,500 but doesn't matter you're talking about lots and lots of them what is the typical uh size of them what is the typical population of them well Aristotle and Plato both sort of theoreticians of the polus each had an idea what's the right size for the perfect polus Aristotle said the right size is a place where all of the citizens by which he meant male adult citizens could come to a central place and hear a speaker and that number

comes out to be about 5,000 male adults Plato being a mathematician as Aristotle was not decided that the perfect polus would have 5,40 citizens why 5,040 you may ask do we have any mathematicians Among Us who will give me a quick answer to that yeah say it again I don't even know what that means that's how good a mathematician I am tell me does it mean the same thing as it has the greatest number of uh numbers that go into it equally that's the answer I heard is that all right okay uh yeah did someone

say all right fine enough of this mathem medical folder roll as you can see I don't understand it but look here's the point we're talking about 5,000 adult males that's the ideal polus as far as these guys are concerned Athens was not the ideal polus it was big how many men did it have in its fullest Bloom somewhere between 40 and 50,000 uh it's impossible to have a better game yes than that um then if you want to say how many human beings lived in ateka when the greatest number did we are speaking about something

between a quarter of a million and 300,000 but you have to understand just from what I've already told you this is extraordinarily large and I think uh you must realize that most poce if you're thinking about a thousand or more poce would have been well under 5,000 adult male citizens so I I would just wanted to give you an idea of just how small most of these places are as well as indicating sharp departures okay now the Pol is from the beginning and it never stopped being the what I'm about to say chiefly agriculture Cal

communities most of the people and I think it's reasonable to Guess that a very high majority of the people would be living on farms engaged in farming feeding themselves and the rest of the community unlike the ancient near Eastern cities these towns do not grow up around a temple or a Marketplace Confluence of Rivers as they do in medieval Europe no they grow up like the Athenian does right smack in the middle of a plane uh which is a good place for farming with a great High Acropolis available even the characteristic thing in apollis the

Agora the marketplace which is also becomes the Civic Center of these towns even these grew up later than the poce they show up a century or more typically and after we know that there's a polus there and the agarra comes about in a gradual way I think we you should never imagine in these real old poce that got the thing started that somebody said let's have a polus uh things just happen they just grew up one nice way if you think here Athens is helpful how many of you ever been Athens raise your hand yeah

and the rest of you when when you you go uh on the North Shore North Slope of the Acropolis beyond the agura there is the uh the area of Athens known as the pla it's the oldest inhabited area in Athens and there you will find that unlike the more modern Athens which has streets laid out at 90° angles perfectly uh it's a mess I mean the streets wind around and and that's because the original streets were followed the way the cattle did their wandering looking for food and then they that became the roads so you

you have to I I want to stress the sense of natural development not some kind of a central Authority making a decision about anything it is also pretty clear that for some time after the foundation of the polis there were no City walls these were not defended your your farmland was not defended uh if you had a house outside the Acropolis as you would it was not defended what happened if the town was attacked invaded everybody who could ran up to the Acropolis to defend thems so that's how things were in the elementary phase now

there are Greek Traditions uh that are taken seriously by the Greeks that suggests that Kings ruled these cities from the beginning and they have lists of Kings with their names and sometimes with stories attached to them and I think myself that there were people who had the title Basel and they were noblemen and that they had some kind of a position of influence and Authority in the state but as I think we have seen already they were not kings in the Oriental sense and once we have a polus it looks as though we don't have

Kings any longer in any shape manner or form what the kind of regime that emerges alongside the polus is an aristocratic Republic in which the noblemen have influence and power within the community by tradition and they are plural there is not one real king there are there is typically a council of aristocrats that is the outfit that counts heid whom I have not mentioned to you before a poet who we think to have lived around 700 BC very early in the history of the polus um wrote one of his poems uh called The Works and

D is advice to Farmers on how to live but it also contains a story in which heia talks about himself and the quarrel he has with his brother over who inherits what from the father and he claims he's been cheated out of his inheritance inheritance because his brother bribed the uh judges well who are these judges he calls them basil Kings these would have been these aristocratic figures who we know in the earliest days of the polus they were the judicial Authority basing that on their claim to Divine descent on their certainly Noble descent and

on the fact that the nobility had a monopoly of knowledge about what the traditions of the community are so but uh heid complains about them and calls them bribe swallowing bases crooked ones plural plural Kings as in Homer it's also interesting Athens has a very clear tradition of thinking they had Kings and what is I think very telling is the story they they give us about how kingship came to an end in Athens I mean I just want to let me start by contrasting it with what I think is fairly typical the Romans also had

Kings I think had probably real Kings uh just before the emergence of their Republic and the that kingship came to an end according to the Roman story and the Republic succeeded it when one of the Kings the last one t quinius Superbus Superbus in Latin means arrogant uh tarquinius misbehaved most seriously by raping the daughter of a nobleman lucrecia that caused a rebellion and they overthrew the Kings and thereafter the word King was a dirty word in Roman history uh the best example is when Julius Caesar has made himself master of Rome but he's still

behaving as though the Republic exists uh people either who want to embarrass him well yes I think people want to embarrass him send around the uh story Caesar is wants to make himself King the word for King in Latin is Rex and so he he he try to diffuse that with a pun by saying non Rex said kaisar I'm not Rex I'm not King I'm not Rex my name is Caesar well in fact he pretty well was ready to turn himself into a king but he wouldn't use that word he wouldn't use that word because

it had such a terrible smell kings were desperat dictators rapists they were not you didn't want to be one well look at the story the Athenians tell um there was this king of Athens Kris was his name they were the Athenians were invaded by an army from the outside Kris LED his forces out against them he fought brilliantly in bravely and drove the enemy from the field in the course of the battle he himself was killed the Athenians loved and were respected him so much that they gave him the almost unheard of honor of burying

him right on the spot where he fell in the field and thereafter his name was always followed with Glory admiration and devotion well what kind of a story is that why do you get rid of a kingdom why would you get rid of king oh I forgot to tell you the why did they get rid of the king because they thought they could never have another one so good so why Try give me a break no I think somebody had to make up a story but the memory of Kings was not of a tarquinius it

was not of a brutal despotic ruler because they didn't have any such thing uh we don't know how the change came about or if some people question if they ever really did have Kings but the picture I want you to have is that's not the tradition the tradition is aristocracy that's what we connect with the polus and of course it was O natural because it also fit into the world of the illy and the Odyssey which they were accustomed to think about I think that's a a good place to stop next time I will uh

take up the story of the expansion of the world of the polus which takes the form of colonization