An obol was a small silver coin. It was placed in a dead man’s mouth so that he had the wherewithal to pay the ferryman Charon for passage across the river Acheron to the underworld.
I omit the term B.C. (or A.D.) with dates except in the rare cases where there might otherwise be a misunderstanding.
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In many respects we can recognize the people of Athens; this is no great surprise, for they pioneered so many of the fields of knowledge that are current and alive today. But in so many ways they inhabited a different moral and technological universe. Their motto was “know yourself”; they simply would not have understood the Christian command to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
If I have helped to bridge the gap between ourselves and our Hellenic forebears and conveyed a little of my enthusiasm for the founders of our civilization, I shall be well pleased.
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LIST OF MAPS
The Aegean Basin
Ancient Athens
The Plain of Marathon
The Battle of Salamis
Athens, Piraeus, and the Long Walls
The Battle of Chaeronea
INTRODUCTION
The young king from foreign and uncivilized Macedon forced the great city of Athens into submission and enslaved the whole of Hellas, together with its quarrelsome horde of city-states. This was not because he seriously disliked the Greeks. Far from it. He was deeply impressed by their military and cultural achievements. In fact, he longed to be accepted as a full and complete member of the Hellenic club.
He was Alexander the Great, son of Philip, and it was the year 334.
But what was the nature of Greekness and how did one get hold of it? The simplest way of answering the question was to study and digest the epic poem the Iliad. Set in a remote past, it concerned the ten-year siege of Troy, a city in Phrygia, by a Greek army.
Every Athenian, indeed every Greek, boy learned of heroes such as Achilles and Agamemnon, Hector and Odysseus, who fought in the war, and did his best to emulate them. Their deeds embodied Greekness. Alexander cast himself as the new Achilles, as the bravest Hellene of them all.
He first encountered the Iliad as a child and it guided his life. He took a copy with him on his travels and when a finely made casket was presented to him that had previously belonged to the Persian Great King he asked his friends what precious object he should keep inside it. All kinds of suggestions were made, but Alexander said firmly that he would deposit his Iliad there for safekeeping and for splendor.
Hellenes at home will have laughed at the royal upstart’s pretensions, but they were just as deeply indebted as Alexander was to the world that Homer conjured to life. It was here that they found their moral, personal, social, and political attitudes.
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In fact, it was a lost world, even when the Iliad was composed sometime towards the end of the eighth century. The poem was a long written text, but inspired by compositions learned by heart and spoken or sung at important social occasions. Homer may or may not have existed, we simply don’t know. He could have been one man, a collective, or even a woman. But anyone reading the poem will feel that he has been in the presence of a controlling mind, whatever its name and nature. (Its companion piece, the Odyssey, which describes the adventures of Odysseus, king of a small island off western Greece, and his ten-year journey home from Troy, may have been another author’s work.)
Did the Trojan War take place? We do not know. But if it or something like it was a historical event, it can be dated towards the end of the second millennium B.C. This marked the high point of a Bronze Age civilization that dominated Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean. We call it Mycenaean after its main city Mycenae in the northeastern Peloponnese. It was its kings and warriors who sailed across the Aegean Sea and sacked Troy.
Not many years after this victory mysterious invaders put a violent end to the Mycenean civilization. It is uncertain who they were, but they ushered in a poorly understood period that modern scholars have called a Dark Age. Centuries of economic and social collapse followed. This meant that Homer was evoking a way of life only dimly remembered. The Iliad and the Odyssey are fictions, but in one crucial sense they embody an essential historical truth, in that they showed many generations of Greeks who they were and what values to live by.
Homer exercised an almost biblical authority. Here, in brief, is the story that he tells.
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The siege of Troy lasted for a decade, but the events in the Iliad cover only a period of fifty-four days in the ninth year and most of the action takes place within four full days. But this close shot captures the glory and the tragedy of slaughter that seems to have no end.
Warfare in Homer is, in essence, a succession of duels between princes and kings; they ride in chariots and throw spears at their opponents. The common people mill about in the background. Achilles, a handsome, lordly, and invincible fighter, occupies the heart of the story. He is by far the best soldier among the Greeks, but he has a terrible temper. He falls out with his commander-in-chief, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, over two pretty girls. The first is Chryseis, the daughter of a local priest dedicated to the archer god Apollo, in appearance a handsome youth eternally in his late teens. Captured by the Greeks on a raid, she is donated as human booty to Agamemnon. Her father complains to the god and pleads for redress.
Then a plague strikes the expeditionary force. The soldiers are crowded into huts on a beach not far from the city of Troy a few miles inland. Their ships are drawn up on the sand beside them. Many die. A soothsayer announces that the epidemic is the god’s punishment for Chryseis’s capture and advises that she be returned to her father at once.
The Hellenic universe was very different from our own. Homer’s men and women live simultaneously in what could be called parallel universes. In one of them things are as they seem. A plague is a plague. But in the second the gods are in charge. On this occasion Apollo comes down in fury on the camp. His arrows clanged in their quiver.
“His descent was like nightfall,” says the poet. “He sat down opposite the ships and shot an arrow, with a dreadful twang from his silver bow. He attacked the mules and the nimble dogs. Then he aimed sharp arrows at the men, and struck again and again. Day and night innumerable fires consumed the dead.”
So through one door of perception an event has a rational explanation, through another, supernatural. The Greeks believed that both are true at one and the same time.
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The chief deities in the Hellenic pantheon are a squabbling family of anthropomorphic immortals. They live in a palace on the peak of Mount Olympus in northern Greece. They enjoy tricks and practical jokes and their “unquenchable laughter” echoes around the mountaintops. Their loves and hates make an entertaining soap opera, but, as we have seen, they are not funny at all when they turn their attention to human beings.
Head of the family is Zeus, the Thunderer and Cloud Compeller—and a henpecked husband. His wife, Hera, is always plotting to obstruct his plans. Then there is the warrior Athena, protectress of Athens. She is the goddess of wisdom and patron of the arts and crafts. She calls her father “an obstinate old sinner, always interfering with my plans.” Both goddesses loathe the Trojans and work tirelessly for their downfall.
This is because they and the goddess of love, Aphrodite, competed long ago for a golden apple, which was to be awarded to the most beautiful of the three. A young Trojan prince, Paris, was the judge and he gave the prize to Aphrodite. If he chose her, she promised him the most beautiful woman in the world for his paramour.