EXTENDED COURSE DESCRIPTION

             I

There is still debate over whether or not Homer existed. Assuming he did exist, however, and that he was sole author of both The Iliad and The Odyssey, we nevertheless know that he stood at the end of many generations of singers and oral poets; and that, from them, he inherited rich traditions of versification, diction, and phrase that reach back to the earliest emergence of Greek literary culture around the 12th Century BC. The Mediterranean at that time was a site of major upheaval. The collapse of the Mycenaean empire resulted in vast adjustments of territory and wholesale migrations of Greek-speaking peoples. It was in this context, in the mingling of different tribes and clans, and in a certain competitiveness around the telling of heroic deeds and champions, that Greek epic developed.

    Yet while the Iliad and the Odyssey both reflect these oral and courtly cultures of the bronze age, they were created as texts only much later, in the 8th BC. The extraordinary care taken in organising and editing these poems in their written form testifies to their ongoing cultural importance in the Greek peninsula. It also reminds us that it as texts, carefully arranged and organised, that we should read them; thinking about the meaning of one moment or episode in relation to the whole. In our classes, we will discuss how the stories and cultural values of The Odyssey most likely belong to a slightly later era than The Iliad. The adventures and wandering of Odysseus reflect newer experiences of the same Achaeans that had won success in conflicts across Asia, and who were now pushing their ships into the Mediterranean to compete with rival traders. Xenia (the ethics of guest-host relationships) now takes precedence over Kleos (glory or fame); and in the place of battles and sieges, we find intrigue and endeavour. The central questions of these two poems are consistent, however, and they permeate much of Greek thought and literature: what is the basis of heroic behaviour? What constitutes individual identity, our sense of self, and how does this relate to society? What is the relation between humans and gods, and how is this relation best ordered? What is a good life?  We will discuss and think about these questions in tangent with close readings of the text, and a range of contemporary critical and philosophical literature. We will also think about Homeric style and consider its legacy in Western literature.

    The world of Hesiod’s Theogony will take us on a journey to the origins of the universe, describing the birth of the gods and an intergenerational war between them. Like the Homeric poems, it is believed that Hesiod’s work was composed orally before being written down in the 8th century. Notably, however, Hesiod’s preoccupations show the influence of the creation myths and wisdom literature of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Moreover, in Works and Days, we have the perspective of a rural labourer, along with rich biographical detail about the poet’s travels and the difficulty of his life. We are here many leagues away from Homer’s tribal aristocracies. In our class on Hesiod, we will discuss the Titanomachy, the succession myth in which Zeus and his sibling Olympians topple Kronos and other Titans of his generation; we will also read from Works and Days, and consider its representation of rural life in terms of early pastoral genre conventions and literature.

    Turning to the lyric poetry on the course, we find ourselves in Archaic Greece proper, with a group of poems composed approximately between the mid-7th and the mid-5th centuries.  In the work of Archilocus, Solon and Sappho, we discover lyrics that are rich and diverse in subject matter. While often personal, erotic and confessional, the political lyric and public themes are also strong currents in the Greek tradition.  Archilochus was highly regarded in his lifetime, and revered by later generations of the ancients. He was known principally for his scurrilous invectives, but he was, as we shall see, equally capable of confessional poems of deep feeling. Solon, the great reformer, and father of greek democracy, deals more directly with politics and moral themes in his elegiacs; and Sappho, perhaps the most famous of Greek lyric poets, is righty lionised for the powerful eroticism and emotional intensity of her poetry. In these poems we will also trace the emergence of a critical attitude to the expansion of the Greek world, as trade and colonisation throughout the 8th and 7th centuries produced changes in the social fabric of the greek city states, with a newly wealthy and confident middle class increasingly pressing their political claims. 

            II

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    It is the fruition of this broad social and political reconfiguration, and the conflicts that defined it, that form the historical context for our reading of Greek tragedy and Plato’s The Republic. The extraordinary 5th century of Classical Greece was hemmed by two decisive conflicts — the Greco-Persian and the Peloponnesian wars. The first of these saw Athens take its place at the head of the Delian League, supplanting Sparta as the dominant city-state of the Greek peninsula, and consolidating its empire. The second saw this outcome reversed in a protracted thirty-year war. Crucially, the fifth century also marked the high-point of Athenian democracy, as a series of reform measures in quick succession gave political power to all male citizens of the city. Aeschylus and Sophocles, as well as celebrated tragedians in Athens, were both combatants in the era’s conflicts. Aeschylus’s The Persians attempts to offer a Persian perspective after the decisive Athenian victory at the Battle of Salamis, quite possibly to serve as a warning against the traps of imperialism. Yet it is to his Oresteia trilogy we will turn. In Agamemnon, we find a work of theological depth, and poetic and theatrical brilliance. We also meet with a series of questions that preoccupied the Athenians: What is justice? What responsibility do we have in enforcing that justice? What responsibility do the god’s have? To whom, or what, above all, do we owe loyalty: the gods, the state, or our families? These questions will become preoccupations of ours for much of the second half of the course. In Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, the attempt to answer them draws upon other important aspects of the 5th century experience: most notably, the intellectual revolution that gave rise to the Sophists and skepticism, and which saw the emergence of new historiographical modes of thought. Euripides will provide us with a view into yet another turn in this great historical movement.  In Orestes (408), the denouement of the Orestes story is re-written to incorporate criticisms of contemporary religion and demagoguery in the democratic process. As in much of Euripides work, there is a weariness with Athenian culture that is frequently tied to the city’s actions in the prosecution of the Peloponnesian war. 

    Plato’s Republic (380 BC) is often thought to represent the apogee of anti-Athenian feeling. In this great foundational work of political philosophy, we see a response to the chaos and turmoil that followed the conclusion of the Peloponnesian war.  Athens’ defeat by Sparta in 408 resulted in the imposition a thirty-man junta over the city that ran a swift campaign of political terror upon the populace. The democratic resistance was based in Piraeus, the port-district of Athens. Yet if Plato ever felt kindly toward their victory, which came after thirteen months, his view of Athenian democracy was sealed in 399 BC with the city fathers’ decision to execute Socrates, his mentor, for impiety. The rule of philosopher-kings outlined in The Republic has been widely interpreted and debated. The most striking readings in the twentieth century are perhaps those of Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt. The former saw in Plato’s Republic the origins the of what the latter conceptualised as totalitarianism, in her analysis of German fascism and Soviet communism.  In our reading of The Republic we will ask if such characterisations are just. We will also be concerned with questioning whether the particular structure of the Republic is necessary and/or inevitable, given the philosophical positions and presuppositions outlined in key books. In this respect, our focus will be on the book’s opening question of what is justice, on Plato’s conception of the tripartite soul, and finally on his theory of knowledge and forms, outlined in books 6 and 7.

    In our final class, we will read and discuss Herodotus and Thucydides, who provide us with the key historiographical legacy of Classical Greece. The former is famed for the inventiveness of his narratives, but also for the deep humanity of his writing. The 20C polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, saw his mirror in Herodotus, whom describes as the first reporter, traveller and researcher of Otherness. With Thucydides we see a triumph of the empirical mind, and a fierce effort of anti-mythical narrative. His History of the Peloponnesian War tells us a great deal about the tensions and the intellectual currents of Athens at this time. We will use these historians to think about the relation between intellectual culture and socio-political relations. In concluding the course, we will review several perspectives on the philosophy of history, ranging from St Augustine, to Giambattista Vico, J.G. Herder, Hegel and Marx, and discuss which of them we feel has most explanatory power in thinking about the Greek experience.