by Peter Watson
Many gods in classical Greece were female–not least Athena herself. But ideas about women, sex and gender were very different from now and women played almost no role in public life. They were not full citizens, so had no direct part in politics, they owned no property, and they belonged to their fathers until marriage, after which they were the property of their husbands. If a woman’s father died, she became the property of his next male kin. When a husband went out at night to attend symposia–fashionable dinners with serious conversation–his wife stayed at home: female company was provided by hetairai, cultured women brought in expressly. Aristotle was only one ancient Greek who believed that women were inferior to men.89 One scholar has claimed that the Greek masculine world was nervous about women, as ‘a defiling element’ who, in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, are put there to ‘subvert the orderliness of male society’.90 In recent years there has been a vast amount of scholarship on gender in ancient Greece. The overall message appears to be that there was a tension between the idea of the home-loving, child-bearing woman and the wild, unrestrained emotional woman (like Medea).
The sculptor Praxiteles (middle of the fourth century BC) introduced the female nude into Western art–what was to become, probably, the single most popular subject of all time. In the process he refined the technique of marble carving, producing smooth planes that depicted skin, female skin especially, with great realism and the hint, more than the hint, of eroticism. Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite for Cnidus, c. 364/361, on the Turkish coast, was described by the Elder Pliny as ‘the finest statue ever made anywhere in the world’.91 It was certainly one of the most influential, although it is now lost.
Whatever the reason for the classical Greek attitude to women, male homosexuality in Greece was far more common, more so than now. Right across the country, and not just in Athens, male partnerships between an older man and his younger beloved were regarded as the norm (which is another reason why classical sculpture consists of so many male nudes, or kouroi). Plato has Phaedrus argue that ‘the most formidable army in the world’ would comprise pairs of male lovers and, indeed, in the fourth century BC, something just like this was actually established–the Theban Sacred Band–and won the battle of Leuctra. ‘A whole educational philosophy was built around such relationships.’92 As with gender studies, there has been an explosion of scholarship in this area.
Given the importance of the Greek legacy, it is perhaps necessary to point out here that, three times recently, scholars have claimed that the Greeks themselves were heavily influenced from outside. The first time was in 1984 when the German historian Walter Burkhart identified a number of specific areas of Greek life and thought that had been shaped by Middle Eastern civilisations. He argued, for instance, that the Hebrew and Assyrian names for Greeks, respectively Jawan and Iawan, or Ionian, showed unmistakable contact between specific areas. In the Odyssey Homer mentioned Phoinikes, men of Sidon, as producers of costly metal vessels. The hoplite weaponry is closely linked to Assyrian arms. The Greek names for the letters of the alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma), are Semitic words, as are many loan words: chrysos (= gold), chiton (= garment, related to cotton). The Akkadian unit of weight, mena, became the Greek mna, and harasu, to scratch or incise, became charaxai, which eventually became the English word ‘character’, an incised letter. The idea of the Hippocratic oath was derived from Babylonian magicians, says Burkhart, as well as the practice of interring guardian figures under buildings (which, as we have seen, began in the Natufian culture). More controversially, Asclepius may be Az(u)gallat(u), ‘the great physician’ in Akkadian, while Lamia may be Lamashtu, the Near Eastern demoness. Finally (though Burkhart gives rafts of other examples), he finds parallels between the Odyssey and the Iliad, on the one hand, and Gilgamesh on the other.93
More recently, and even more controversially, Martin Bernal, a professor of government at Columbia University in New York, has argued, in Black Athena, that northern Africa, in particular ancient Egypt–several dynasties of whom were black–was the predominant influence on classical Greece. He argued that the bull cult started in Egypt before transferring to Crete in the Minoan civilisation. He too looked at loan words and at parallels between, for example, Egyptian writing and Aeschylus’ The Supplicants. Kephisos, the name for rivers and streams all over Greece, he derives from Kbh, ‘a common Egyptian river name, “fresh”.’ In a chapter on Athens, he argues that the name is derived from the Egyptian HtNt: ‘In antiquity, Athena was constantly identified with the Egyptian goddess, Nt or Neit. Both were virgin divinities of water, weaving and wisdom.’ And so on into pottery styles, military terms and the meaning of sphinxes.94 Bernal was even more heavily criticised than Allan Bloom was, for poor scholarship and faulty interpretation of dates and data, and for not delivering later volumes as promised.
The third time that outside influence on Greece has been advanced comes from M. L. West, in The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (1997). West confirms a heavy overlap between, for example, Gilgamesh and the Iliad, between Gilgamesh and Odysseus, and between Sappho and Babylonian poems.95 This is not to diminish the Greek achievement, just to place it in sensible context, and to reaffirm, pace Bernal, that on balance the traditional view of Greece, that it owes more to the Middle East and the Balkans than to north Africa, still prevails. Such a background is a necessary perspective, to show where Greek ideas may have originated, but it does nothing to change the importance of those ideas.
Aristotle died in 322 BC. In 1962 Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford historian of ideas, gave a series of lectures at Yale, later published in book form, in which he noted that a great change came over Greece in the wake of Aristotle’s death. ‘Some sixteen years or so later, Epicurus began to teach in Athens, and after him Zeno, a Phoenician from Kition in Cyprus. Within a few years theirs are the dominant philosophical schools in Athens. It is as if political philosophy had suddenly vanished away. There is nothing about the city, the education of citizens to perform their tasks within it…[T]he notion of fulfilment as necessarily social and public disappears without a trace. Within twenty years or less we find, in place of hierarchy, equality; in place of emphasis on the superiority of specialists, the doctrine that any man can discover the truth for himself and live the good life as well as any other man; in place of emphasis on intellectual gifts…there is now stress upon the will, moral qualities, character;…in the place of the outer life, the inner life; in place of political commitment…we now have a notion of individual self-sufficiency, praise of austerity, a puritanical emphasis on duty…stress on the fact that the highest of all values is peace of soul, individual salvation, obtained not by knowledge of the accumulating kind, not by the gradual increase of scientific information (as Aristotle taught)…but by sudden conversion–a shining of the inner light. Men are distinguished into the converted and the unconverted.’96
This is, says Berlin, the birth of Greek individualism, one of the three great turning points in Western political theory (we shall come across the other two in due course). In Greece’s classical period, Berlin says, it was a commonplace that human beings were conceived in essentially social terms. It is taken for granted by all–philosophers, dramatists, historians–that ‘the natural life of men is the institutionalised life of the polis’. ‘One should say not that a citizen belongs to himself,’ says Aristotle, in the Politics, ‘but that all belong to the polis: for the individual is a part of the polis.’97 Epicurus, on the other hand, says something very different, ‘Man is not by nature adapted for living in civic communities.’98 Nothing, he adds, is an end in itself except individual happiness. Justice, taxes, voting–these have no value in themselves, other than their utilitarian value for what happiness they bring the individual. Independence is everything. In the same way, the Stoics, after Zeno, sought apathia, passionlessness–their ideal was to be impassive, dry, detached and invulnerable. ‘Man is a dog tied to a cart; if he is wise he will run wi
th it.’99 Zeno, a mathematician as well as a Stoic, told men to look into themselves, because there was nowhere else to look, and to obey the laws of physis, nature, but none other. Society was a fundamental hindrance to the all-important aim in life–which was self-sufficiency. He and his supporters advocated extreme social freedom: sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, incest, the eating of human flesh. Human law is irrational, ‘nothing to the wise man’.100
Berlin thought that the consequences of this break in thought were immense. ‘For the first time the idea gains ground that politics is a squalid occupation, not worthy of the wise and the good. The division of ethics and politics is made absolute;…Not public order but personal salvation is all that matters.’101 Most historians, he acknowledged, agree that this change came about because of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great’s destruction of so many city-states in their conquests, as a result of which the polis became insignificant. With the old, familiar landmarks gone, and with man surrounded by a vast empire, a concern with personal salvation made sense. Men retreated into themselves.102
Berlin didn’t agree. He thought it all happened too quickly. Furthermore, the poleis were not destroyed by Alexander–in fact, new ones were created.103 Instead, Berlin saw the origin of the new ideas beginning in Antiphon, a sophist at the end of the fifth century, and in Diogenes, who reacted against the polis with a belief that only the truly independent man was free, ‘and freedom alone makes happy’. Only the construction of a private life can satisfy the deepest needs of man, who can attain to happiness and dignity only by following nature, which means ignoring artificial arrangements.104 Berlin in fact wonders if this was not an idea imported from the Orient, since Zeno came from the Phoenician colony of Cyprus, Diogenes from Babylon, and others of like mind from Sidon, Syria and the Bosporus. (‘Not a single Stoic was born in old Greece.’)
Whatever its origin, the revolution in ideas consisted of five core elements. One, politics and ethics were divorced. ‘The natural unit is now no longer the group…but the individual. His needs, his purposes, his solutions, his fate are what matter.’ Two, the only genuine life is the inner life–the outer life is expendable. Three, ethics are the ethics of the individual, leading to a new value on privacy, in turn leading to one of the main ideas of freedom by which we now live, that frontiers must be drawn, beyond which the State is not entitled to venture. Four, politics was degraded, as unworthy of a truly gifted man. And fifth, there grew up a fundamental division, between the view that there is a common bond among people, a unity to life, and that all men are islands. This has surely been a fundamental political difference between people ever since.
‘Classical’ is itself an idea. In the twenty-first century, it confirms a measure of excellence and a certain taste: classical music; classic rock; this or that publisher’s list of ‘the classics’–books we all ought to be familiar with from whatever era; even classic cars, an established category in auction house sales. When we describe something as ‘a classic’ we mean that it is the best of its kind, good enough to endure as a standard in the future. But when we speak about classical Greece, we are talking about Greece in general, and Athens in particular, in the fifth century BC, the names and ideas addressed in this chapter.105 Ideas and practices which were all new but have stood the test of time since, as Allan Bloom insisted. We shall see in Chapter 9 that it was the Roman reverence for the Greek way of life that gave rise to the notion of the ‘classics’, the idea that the best that has been thought and written and carved and painted in the past is worth preserving and profiting from. We have a lot to thank the Romans for, but here is perhaps the best answer to those who attacked Allan Bloom and his like for championing the achievements of ‘dead, white, European males’ in a small city-state 2,500 years ago. These are the words of the German historian of science Theodor Gomperz: ‘Nearly our entire intellectual education originates from the Greeks. A thorough knowledge of their origin is the indisputable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence.’106
7
The Ideas of Israel, the Idea of Jesus
To Chapter 7 Notes and References
In 597 BC, the disaster that had always threatened to engulf Israel finally overwhelmed her. Led by King Nebuchadnezzer, the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem, captured the king and appointed their own governor. According to the second book of Kings, ‘all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and all the smiths’, were removed, with only the poorest people of the land remaining.1 Worse, the ruler appointed proved so unpopular that uprisings went on and the city was again besieged. When, eventually, the starving city fell a second time, in 586 BC, the Babylonians wreaked terrible havoc, sacking everything, including the Temple. Those who could, escaped, but another batch of captives was taken into exile. ‘From that date on, more Jews would live outside Palestine than within her borders.’2
Just how many people were involved is far from certain. Although the book of Kings refers to 10,000, figures in Jeremiah are more modest, around 4,600 in all, only 832 of them in 586. On the other hand, these figures may refer only to adult males: if they do, we are probably talking about 20,000 overall. Either way, it was a small group, a fact of some importance because it made it easier for the Jews in exile to retain their cohesiveness.
For them, this misfortune was in many ways cataclysmic. As Paula Fredericksen has observed, one conclusion the Jews could have drawn from their predicament, ‘and perhaps the most realistic’, might have been that their God was in fact much less powerful than the gods of their neighbours. Instead, the Jews drew the diametrically opposite conclusion: her misfortune confirmed what the prophets had foretold, that she had strayed too far from her covenant with Yahweh, and was being punished. This implied that a major change in Jewish behaviour was needed, and exile provided just such a breathing space.3
It was in exile that much of Judaism came into being, though present-day Judaisms have evolved as much as, say, Christianity has developed beyond its early days. (The Judaism that we know today didn’t become stabilised until roughly AD 200.) The most important change was that, lacking a territory of their own, or a political or spiritual leader, the Jews were forced to look for a new way to preserve their identity and their unique relation with their God. The answer lay in their writings. There was no Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, as we know it, as the Jews went into exile. Instead, they had a collection of scrolls containing civil law, they had a tradition of the Ten Commandments, they had a book of other religious laws, said to have been compiled by Moses, they had such scrolls as the Book of Wars, and they had the sayings of their prophets and their psalms, which had been sung in the Temple.4
In the past, the scribes had not been especially prestigious. Now, as the book became more central to the faith, so the status of the scribes improved. For a time, in fact, they became more important than the priests, as they were financed by wealthy merchants to write down material that would establish traditions and keep the people together. Also, many of their fellow-Israelites looked upon writing as a near-magical activity, possibly of divine origin. As well as writing, of course, the scribes could read. In Mesopotamia, they came across the many writings of Sumerians, Assyrians and Babylonians and, in time, translated their texts. In this way they came under the influence of other cultures, including other religious beliefs.
But it was not only written traditions that were consolidated in exile. It was now that certain dietary laws were first insisted upon, and circumcision, ‘to distinguish Jews irrevocably from pagans’.5 (Other peoples in antiquity, such as the Egyptians, practised circumcision, and the Syrians abstained from eating fish.) Babylonian astronomy was considerably more sophisticated than that of the Jews and so they used this fact to update their liturgical year, devising a cycle of regular festivals: Passover (the Angel of the Lord passing over the Israelites as they crossed the Red Sea into the Promised Land–therefore th
e founding of the state); Pentecost–the giving of the Laws, the founding of the religion; and the Day of Atonement–anticipation of the Day of Judgement. It was only now that the Sabbath, which had been referred to in Isaiah, took on a new significance (this is inferred because records show that the most popular new name at this time was ‘Shabbetai’). Shabbatum, as was mentioned in an earlier chapter, was originally a Babylonian word and custom, meaning ‘full moon day’, when no work was done.6 There is even some evidence that the idea of a ‘Covenant’ with God derives from this time of exile. It is reminiscent of an old idea in Zoroastrianism and, as we shall see, the man who eventually freed the Jews from exile, Cyrus the Great, was a Zoroastrian.
