by Peter Watson
51. Needing a guide on the way to Hades has suggested to some scholars that there was a growing anxiety about one’s fate after death, perhaps because of recent wars. The grandest mention of the Elysian Fields is in the Aeneid, when Aeneas visits the fields to see his father, Anchises.
52. Bremmer, Op. cit., page 7.
53. Brandon, Op. cit., page 79.
54. Nephesh never means the soul of the dead and is not contrasted with the body. The Israelites had a word, ruach, usually translated as ‘spirit’, but it could as easily mean ‘charisma’. It denoted the physical and psychical energy of remarkable people, like Elijah. Bremmer, Op. cit., page 8.
55. Ibid., pages 8–9.
56. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, London: Routledge, 1953, page 2. For a more sociological version of this theory, see Robert Bellah’s article, ‘Religious evolution’, reprinted in his Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1970/1991.
57. Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God, London: Grant Richards, 1904, page 180.
58. Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rendsburg, The Bible in the Ancient Near East, New York: Norton, 1997, pages 109–113.
59. Allen, Op. cit., page 181.
60. Ibid., page 182.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., page 184.
63. Ibid., pages 185–186. See John Murphy, The Origins and History of Religions, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949, pages 176ff, for other early Hebrew traditions.
64. Menhirs and dolmens, though perhaps not as impressive as in western Europe, are still found all across ancient Phoenicia, Canaan, modern-day Galilee and Syria (Herodotus described a stela he saw in Syria that was decorated with female pudenda). Allen, Op. cit., pages 186–187.
65. Ibid., page 190.
66. Ibid., page 192.
67. ‘If Israel obeys Yahweh,’ says the Deuteronomist, ‘Yahweh will make thee plenteous for good in the fruit of thy belly, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground,’ but if Israel ‘ignores the jealous god, then “cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep”.’ Allen, Op. cit., page 194. Finally, in this context of Yahweh as a god of fertility, there is his demand that the first-born be offered as a sacrifice. In the pagan world the first child was often understood to be the offspring of a god ‘who had impregnated the mother in an act of droit de seigneur’. Karen Armstrong, A History of God, London: Vintage, 1999, page 26.
68. Allen, Op. cit., page 212.
69. Ibid., page 213.
70. Ibid., page 215.
71. Ibid., pages 216–217.
72. Ibid., page 219. See Bouquet, Op. cit., chapter 6, ‘The golden age of religious creativity’, pages 95–111. Kerkes, Op. cit., page 32.
73. Allen, Op. cit., page 22 for the forgery of Deuteronomy.
74. Bruce Vawter, The Conscience of Israel, London: Sheed & Ward, 1961, page 15.
75. Ibid., page 18.
76. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987, page 38. See also Norman Podhoretz, The Prophets, New York: The Free Press, 2002, page 92.
77. The phenomenon broke out at the time of the Philistine wars, and this links the prophets with the Nazirites, who indulged in ecstatic dances and other physical movements repeated so often that they finally succumbed to a kind of hypnotic suggestion, under the influence of which they would remain unconscious for hours. Vawter, Op. cit., pages 22–23. Ecstaticism had burned itself out by the time that the great moral prophets of the eighth century made their appearance. The Israelites had shared with neighbouring tribes the practice of divination, such as auguring with animal livers, but that too had fallen into disuse. Ibid., pages 24 and 31.
78. Ibid., pages 39–40.
79. Johnson, Op. cit., pages 36–38. The prophets, incidentally, opposed images of God, because this deprived the king of the day of appropriating such images to himself–and the ‘divinity’ and power that went with it–and because an ‘invisible’, interior god, helped their vision, driving men and women back on themselves as moral agents. Ibid., page 124.
80. Vawter, Op. cit., page 66. See also: Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, New York: The Free Press, 2001, pages 172–173.
81. Vawter, Op. cit., page 82.
82. Ibid., page 95; Podhoretz, Op. cit., pages 119f.
83. Vawter, Op. cit., page 111.
84. Ibid., page 72.
85. Micah, the next of the prophets, took as his main target what historian Bruce Vawter calls ‘Judahite capitalism’, the growth of large estates (confirmed by archaeology), the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, relegating the rest of the population to the status of ‘helpless dependants’, though priests were attacked for the personal gain they put before all else, and because, in collaboration with the Assyrians, they turned away from Yahweh-worship to other gods. Micah was active between 750 and 686 BC, and so as late as this Yahweh-worship was not settled in Israel. Vawter, Op. cit., page 154.
86. Podhoretz, Op. cit., page 183; Vawter, Op. cit., pages 165–166.
87. Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History, London: Cape, 1999, page 56. Vawter, Op. cit., page 170.
88. Vawter, Op. cit., page 175.
89. Ibid., page 75.
90. Podhoretz, Op. cit., page 187 and 191; Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 253. Vawter, Op. cit., page 75.
91. Podhoretz, Op. cit., pages 219ff. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 297.
92. Paul Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, page 206.
93. Ibid., page 222.
94. Ibid., page 119.
95. Ibid., page 120.
96. Ibid., page 49. See also: A Nietzsche Reader, selected and translated, and with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1977, especially pages 71–124, on morality.
97. Brandon, Op. cit., page 96.
98. Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 210.
99. Eliade, Op. cit., page 309.
100. Since the primitive daevas all at some time or another practise deceit, Zarathustra demands that his disciples no longer worship them. In envisaging the ‘way of righteousness’, Zoroastrianism prefigures both Plato (in his concern with Good), Buddhism and Confucianism. In demanding that his disciples no longer worship the daevas, his ideas may have helped the Jews move from henotheism (the belief that only one god out of many is worthy of worship) to true monotheism (the belief that there is only one god). Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 183.
101. Ibid., page 210.
102. Ibid.
103. Eliade, Op. cit., page 308.
104. Ibid., page 312.
105. Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 195.
106. Eliade, Op. cit., page 330.
107. Pat Alexander (editor), The World’s Religions, Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1994, page 170.
108. Ibid., page 173.
109. Ibid., page 174.
110. Karen Armstrong, Buddha, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, page 15.
111. Ibid., page 19.
112. Ibid., page 23.
113. S. G. F. Brandon (editor), The Saviour God, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963, page 218.
114. Ibid., page 86.
115. Ibid., page 89.
116. Ibid., page 90.
117. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 41.
118. Ibid., page 42.
119. Ibid.
120. R. M. Cook, The Greeks Till Alexander, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1962, page 86. See also: Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 45.
121. Armstrong, Op. cit., page 46. See Cook, Op. cit., page 41 for the way Plato modified his theories.
122. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 48.
123. Ibid., page 49.
124. D. Howard Smith, Confucius, London: Temple Smith, 1973. John D. Fa
irbanks, China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992, pages 50–51.
125. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 25.
126. Ibid., pages 33–34.
127. Brandon, Op. cit., page 98.
128. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 43.
129. Ibid., page 45.
130. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 63.
131. Ibid., page 66. See also Bouquet, Op. cit., page 180.
132. Benjamin I. Schwarz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985, page 193. Brandon (editor), Op. cit., page 179.
133. D. C. Lau, Introduction to Lao Tzu, Tao te ching, London: Penguin, 1963, pages xv–xix.
134. Schwarz, Op. cit., page 202. Brandon (editor), Op. cit., page 180.
CHAPTER 6: THE ORIGINS OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMANITIES
1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, London: Penguin, 1987, page 369.
2. H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks, London: Penguin, 1961.
3. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, pages 24.
4. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World, New York and London: Vintage, 1999, Part II.
5. A. R. Burn, The Penguin History of Greece, London: Penguin, 1966, page 28.
6. Ibid., pages 64–67.
7. Ibid., page 68. See above, pages 90–91.
8. Robert B. Downs, Books That Changed the World, New York: Mentor, 1983, pages 41. See also Burn, Op. cit., page 73.
9. John Roberts, A Short Illustrated History of the World, London: Helicon, 1993, page 108.
10. Burn, Op. cit., 119.
11. Ibid., pages 119–121. Tyrant became a pejorative term under the later, democratic Greeks. See also: Peter Jones, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Classics, London: Gerald Duckworth, 1999/2002, page 70.
12. Kitto, Op. cit., pages 75 and 78. For the population of Athens, see Jones, Op. cit., page 65.
13. Roberts, Op. cit., page 109.
14. Kitto, Op. cit., page 126.
15. Ibid., page 129.
16. Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1954/1996, pages 55–58.
17. Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece, New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 2002, pages 242–248.
18. Geoffrey Lloyd, The Revolution in Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practices of Ancient Greek Science, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1987, page 85.
19. Ibid., pages 56, 62, 109 and 131.
20. Ibid., page 353.
21. Schrödinger, Op. cit., page 58.
22. Michael Grant, The Classical Greeks, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989, page 46.
23. Kitto, Op. cit., page 177.
24. Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, Op. cit., page 9.
25. Kitto, Op. cit., page 179.
26. Ibid., page 181.
27. Burn, Op. cit., page 131; see also: Cook, Op. cit., page 86.
28. Burn, Op. cit., page 138.
29. E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, page 36.
30. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, page 29.
31. Ibid., page 34.
32. Burn, Op. cit., page 247. See Cook, Op. cit., page 147 for a discussion of Anaxagoras’ understanding of perspective.
33. Burn, Op. cit., page 248.
34. Schrödinger, Op. cit., page 78.
35. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 31.
36. Ibid., page 113.
37. Burn, Op. cit., page 271; also Cook, Op. cit., page 144.
38. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 116.
39. Burn, Op. cit., page 272.
40. Geoffrey Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979, chapter 4.
41. Lloyd and Sivin, Op. cit., page 241.
42. Grant, Op. cit., page 47.
43. Ibid., page 70. Cook, Op. cit., page 138, says that sophists often became the butt of jokes.
44. Grant, Op. cit., page 72.
45. Freeman, Op. cit., page 24.
46. Burn, Op. cit., page 307.
47. Grant, Op. cit., pages 209–212.
48. Lindberg, Op. cit., pages 40–41.
49. Pierre Leveque, The Greek Adventure, translated by Miriam Kochan, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, page 358. The notion (we have to be careful here when using the word ‘idea’), that there is another world, beyond the immediate realm of the senses, Plato also applied to the soul. ‘The soul was an independent substance which did not have an organic relationship to the body; it could reflect and conceive ideas.’ Ibid. But the body was always getting in the way, and defiling the experience of the Forms. Morality, the good life in Socrates’ sense, consisted in trying to escape from the corrupting influence of the body. ‘While we live we shall be nearest to knowledge when we avoid, so far as possible, intercourse and communion with the body…but keep ourselves pure from it.’ The soul–and the Ideas–could occasionally be glimpsed in the here and now: this is what contemplation, scholarship, poetry and love were for. For Plato death spelled the end for the body but the soul remained incorruptible ‘because of its participation in the ideas’. The soul was drawn in a chariot by two horses, the horse of noble passions and the horse of base passions, driven by reason.
50. Leveque, Op. cit., page 359.
51. Ibid. See Cook, Op. cit., page 146 for Plato’s writing style.
52. Leveque, Op. cit., page 361.
53. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 57.
54. Ibid., page 58.
55. Ibid., page 59.
56. Ibid., page 61.
57. Ibid., page 62. In politics he had an assistant survey 150 different city-states around the Mediterranean. Cook, Op. cit., page 143. The story of that survival is itself a web of Byzantine complexity. The books were inherited several times, buried in an underground cellar, taken to Rome, where they were catalogued by one Andronicus of Rhodes.
58. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 64.
59. Ibid., page 65.
60. Lereque, Op. cit., page 365.
61. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 69.
62. Ibid. But see Cook, Op. cit., pages 142–143 for Aristotle’s theory that virtue was a mean between two vices.
63. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 71.
64. Leveque, Op. cit., page 363.
65. Ibid., page 364.
66. Ibid.
67. Grant, Op. cit., page 252.
68. Burn, Op. cit., page 204.
69. Grant, Op. cit., page 39.
70. Burn, Op. cit., page 124.
71. Ibid.
72. Grant, Op. cit., page 39.
73. Ibid., page 40. See also Cook, Op. cit., page 145.
74. Burn, Op. cit., page 205.
75. Grant, Op. cit., page 110.
76. Ibid., pages 129–130. Cook, Op. cit., page 145.
77. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 79.
78. Grant, Op. cit., page 158.
79. Ibid., page 159. Cook, Op. cit., page 118.
80. John Boardman, Greek Art, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996, page 145.
81. Cook, Op. cit., page 157. Grant, Op. cit., pages 95–96.
82. Grant, Op. cit., page 81.
83. What many people consider to be the climax of classical Greek sculpture was discovered in 1972 in the sea off Riace in Calabria, southern Italy. These are the so-called Riace bronzes, two male figures about six feet tall. Both are bearded, were originally helmeted and may have carried shields, though these have been lost, possibly looted. The figures have luxuriant hair, with lips and nipples (and possibly eyelashes) made of copper. Technically, and realistically, the statues are second to none and although, in truth, we do not know w
ho fashioned them, the two main candidates are, first, Pythagoras, a sculptor described by Pliny as the ‘first to represent such anatomical details as sinews and veins and hair’ and whose native town was Rhegium (the modern Reggio Calabria), near where the bronzes were brought up; and second, Polyclitus. This attribution is based on the fact that he worked a lot in bronze, in Argos, and because the statues have various Argive features. His work, too, is known only through copies, one the ‘Youth Holding a Spear’ (Doryphorus), in Naples, and the other, ‘Youth Binding a Fillet Round His Head’ (Diadumenus) of which there are various copies. But Polyclitus also wrote a Canon, embodying his view of what the ideal proportions for a human being should be. This shows that Polyclitus had a mathematical view of beauty–it was a philosophical matter of proportions, the human body ‘a supreme demonstration of mathematical principle’. Pliny said that many people were influenced by the Canon. Polyclitus beat Phidias in a competition for the statue of an Amazon for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. But none of this proves that the Riace bronzes are by him and the possibility is real that the climax of classical Greek sculpture was produced by an unknown hand. Grant, Op. cit., pages 81ff.
