Transcript From Classical to Contemporary

To the Cave
HUM 2051: Civilization I
Fall 2012
Dr. Perdigao
October 3-5, 2012
Fracturing Civilizations
• Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations (2000-1100 BCE; 2600-1250 BCE)
• Dark Age: 1100-800 BCE
• Persian Wars (490 BCE-479 BCE)
• Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE)
A Tale of Two City-States
• Development of the polis, city-state
• Some city-states with fewer than 5,000 male citizens; Athens, largest citystate, with 35,000-40,000 adult male citizens and total population of 350,000
(Perry 57)
• City-state began as religious institution like in Near East but then shifted
away from a tribal-religious institution to a secular-rational institution,
shift from myth to reason (Perry 57)
• Athenian democracy at height in 5th century BCE
• Sparta and Athens as centers
• Sparta: on Peloponnesian peninsula; as armed camp, conquering
neighboring regions; isolationism and stagnant cultural development (57)
• Sparta: leader of Peloponnesian League, alliance of southern Greek citystates (57)
To the polis
• Athens: unlike agricultural Sparta, near the coast, strong navy and
commercial industry (Perry 57)
• Four stages of Greek city-states: rule by king (monarchy); rule by landowning aristocrats (oligarchy); rule by one man who seized power
(tyranny); rule by the people (democracy) (Perry 57)
• Oligarchy in 8th century BCE Athens when aristocrats took power
• Solon, the Reformer (640-559 BCE): 594 BCE, as chief executive, initiates
transition into democracy, seeing problems with aristocratic power and
threat of civil war; “rational approach” (59)
• De-emphasizing role of the gods; institutes Assembly, with all free men
allowed to sit on Assembly, Council of Four Hundred (59)
• Cleisthenes’ democratic Athens, ostracism as safeguard against tyranny,
singling out individuals who were threats to the state (60)
Conquest and Resistance
• Persian Wars: Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor revolt against Persia; Athens
sends twenty ships to aid revolt (Perry 60)
• 490 BCE, Darius I, king of Persia, in retaliation, sends detachment to
Attica; at Marathon, Athenians defeat Persians (Perry 60)
• 10 years later, Xerxes, Darius’ son, sends force of 250,000 men and over 500
ships, to invade Greece (60)
• Unification of Greek city-states in defense of independence and liberty
(60)
• Athens and Sparta united
Conquest and Resistance
• Thermopylae=300, 300 Spartans with training and “ideal of arêté” resist
(Perry 61)
• Northern Greece fell to the Persians now moving south to Athens (61)
• Themistocles, Athenian statesman and general, lures Persian fleet to Bay
of Salamis, then they again defeat Persians at Plataea; military strategy
results in Athenian naval victory (Perry 61)
• 479 BCE: Spartans defeat Persians in land battle of Plataea (61)
• Leads to era of Athenian imperialism, “Golden Age,” Athenian urge for
dominance in Greece (Perry 61)
• 150 city-states organized Delian League, named after treasury on island of
Delos, to protect themselves against Persian invasion, centralized Athenian
power (61)
Conquest and Resistance
• Flourishing of Athenian democracy and culture (Perry 61)
• Assembly open to all adult male citizens; debate and vote on war, treaties,
spending (61)
• Isonomy—equality of political rights of citizens—to vote, to speak before
and submit motions to Assembly, hold public office, receive equal
treatment (62)
• Council of Five Hundred managed ports, military installations, state
properties, and prepared the agenda for the Assembly (62)
• Members chosen by lot; individuals could not serve more than twice in a
lifetime, could never supersede the Assembly
• Limitations and weaknesses of democratic system: slaves and women
denied legal and political rights; denial of “human rights” epitomized in
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Perry 63)
Contextualizing Aristophanes and Plato
• Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BCE;
temporary peace from 421-414 BCE) ends the Golden Age
• Pericles—Athens (495-429 BCE), reforms during the Golden Age, court
system (Perry 65)
• Pericles’ oration reconstructed by Thucydides to commemorate the
Athenian war casualties at the start of the war, reveals “Athenian
democratic ideal,” “civic and personal freedom” (Perry 65)—distinction
between Spartans’ “concept of excellence” with the Athenians’
“humanistic ideal of the full development of the human personality”
(65)
• Fear of growth of Athenian power, failed peace treaty negotiated by
Pericles, plague in Athens (430 BCE), death of Pericles
• Athenian sea power leads to first stage ends in stalemate, peace treaty in
421 BCE (65)
• Athenian expedition against Sicily and largest city Syracuse (65), desire
to extend empire west, reignites war; Athens loses 50,000 men and 200
ships; Sparta resumes attack in 414 BCE, now backed by Persia
Contextualizing Aristophanes and Plato
• Athens surrenders as navy and food supply lost
• 404 BCE Sparta dissolves Delian League
• Shatters Hellenic society (66), strife between oligarchs and democrats
• 411 BCE, Four Hundred take power over Athens but ultimately forced
out (67)
• Thirty Tyrants (404-403 BCE) led by Critias, antidemocrat, take power,
supported by Sparta; confiscate property, condemn people to death
• 404-403 BCE, returned exiles lead uprising, unseat the Thirty (67)
• Peloponnesian War as great crisis; city-states never recovered (67)
• Shift from sense of civic duty to personal gain, dismantling of polis
upheld by Pericles (67); move to larger states and empires (68)
• City-states, in unity, had conquered Persian threat but are destroyed in
Peloponnesian War
Contextualizing Aristophanes
• Hubris as downfall for the city-states, ideas of conquest (Perry 70)
• Idea of institutions as human-made, constructs, rather than decreed by
gods, shift in ideas about civic duty; rationalism’s effects (70)
• Sophists, according to Socrates, “attacked the old system of beliefs but
had not provided the individual with a satisfactory replacement” (79)
Constructing History
• Herodotus (485-425 BCE), Thucydides (455-399 BCE)—as key
historians, establishing “Western civilization’s tradition of history
writing”; Herodotus as “father of history” (Perry 95)
• Herodotus’ Histories representing Persian Wars (clash between cultures
of the East and West) (420 BCE); Thucydides’ History of the
Peloponnesian War counters Herodotus’ approach to look at power
politics operating in history, “no place for myths, for legends, for the
fabulous,” “rejecting the notion that the gods interfere in history”
(Perry 96)
• Idea of cause-and-effect, analysis of historical contexts, selfconsciousness
• Man’s “will to power and domination” as cause (96)
Some Forms
• Sophists—“men of wisdom,” teaching from city to city rhetoric, grammar,
poetry, gymnastics, mathematics, and music; political and ethical concerns,
secular education; teaching “political arêté,” “the skill to formulate the
right laws and policies for cities and the art of eloquence and persuasion
needed for success in public life” (78)
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Socrates (469-399 BCE)
Socratic thought as counter to system
Aristophanes—critic of both Socrates and Sophists
Socrates—born about 10 years after Persian Wars, executed 5 years after the
end of the Peloponnesian War (Perry 79)
• Plato (429-347 BCE): astronomy, mathematics, political philosophy,
metaphysics, ethics
• Forms/Ideas vs. relativism of Sophists
• Plato—founded the Academy, history of philosophical tradition—in
dialogue/dialectic model
The Charges
• Thirty Tyrants
• Persecution and execution of Socrates because of his follower Critias (one
of Thirty’s leaders)
• Impiety
• 501 male citizens
• Death vs. exile
The Stance
• Apology as defense: “So, men of Athens, I’m far from pleading in my own
defense now, as might be supposed. Instead, I’m pleading in yours, so that
you don’t commit a great wrong against the god’s gift to you by
condemning me” (770)
• Gadfly that “awakens, cajoles, and reproaches” (770)
• Achilles’ example (768): “You see, fearing death, gentlemen, is nothing
other than thinking one is wise when one isn’t, since it’s thinking one
knows what one doesn’t know” (769).
• “it’s the greatest good for a man to discuss virtues every day . . . on the
grounds that the unexamined life isn’t worth living for a human being”
(776).
• Orpheus, Homer, Ajax, Odysseus, Sisyphus—following those examples,
like Odysseus
Republic as “true apology”
• From Alan Bloom’s “Interpretive Essay”:
“The Republic shows us why Socrates was accused and why there was good
reason to accuse him. Not only does he tell us about the good regime, but
we see his effect on the young men he was said to have corrupted.
Socrates, in leading them to a justice which is not Athenian, or even Greek,
but is rather human, precisely because it is rational, shows the way to the
truth about political things and develops the extremely complex
relationship of that truth to civil society. These questions are most
relevant to modern man, although they are perhaps harder for him to
understand than for men of any previous generation. . . . For these reasons
it behooves us to study the Republic. For it is the first book which brings
philosophy ‘down into the cities’; and we watch in it the foundation of
political science, the only discipline which can bring the blessings of reason
to the city” (310).
Paradoxical Understandings
• Rise to epistemology (how we know what we know)
• Meno’s paradox: if you know, then why ask questions but how do you
know to ask questions if you do not know?
• Translation: You need to know what you are looking for to find it and, if
you don’t know what you are looking for, there is no need to search for it.
So how do we come to know anything?
• Function of justice, based on rules and fear
• Glaucon (Plato’s brother), Adaimantus (Plato’s brother)
• Glaucon’s social contract: desire to do unjust things but fear others will do
injustice—we act just through fear; problem with democracy
The Just City
• Laws are lies, only the appearance of justice
• City of speech—goal to tell beneficial lies; gold, silver, bronze races lead to
classes; if we come from the earth, then we are more loyal to earth and city
• Virtues in The Republic:
– Wisdom (rulers know good for city and act in those interests)
– Courage (guardians do what they must)
– Moderation (all groups in city, their relationships; agreement of ruler
and those to be ruled, in natural harmony—craftsman is ruler of the
shoe, knowledge=what everyone strives to rule)
– Justice (be just, then moderation will flow from it)
Hierarchy of the City, the Self
• Philosopher knows self but lies to others
• Aristophanes’ Clouds shows Socrates worshipping them but clouds side
with gods, teach him how to be politically savvy
• Sun=nature; Good=light of the sun
Rulers: Reason
Guardians: Thumos
Craftsmen: Eros
• Question if philosophers corrupt the city, intelligence for selves or others—
for sake of city
Divisions
• Sun is truth and reality
• Divided line—Sun: light and power of the sun/world of sight and things
seen
• From belief to knowledge:
images: objects: thought-images: ideas or ideals
belief: mathematical thought: dialectical thought
the changing world of the senses: understanding: exercise
of reason
• Ideal is in the realm of Good—the Real (in The Allegory of the Cave):
– Come to know ideals and act accordingly in the world
– As pure concept, compared to imitations
– Literature as second order imitation