Introduction to Western Literature The Ancient World of

Introduction to Western Literature

The Ancient World of Western Literature (1) • • Time: roughly from 800 B. C. E. to 400 B. C. E. Place: The Mediterranean Basin The literature of this period was written in three languages: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The Roman Conquest brought the civilizations of these three languages into contact with one another and produced a fusion of their typical attitudes that formed the basis of later European thought.

The Ancient World of Western Literature (2) • The three separate lines meet in the figure of St. Augustine (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430) : • the intellectual honesty and curiosity of the Greeks, • the social seriousness and sense of order of the Romans, and • The Hebrews’ feeling of human inadequacy and God’s omnipotent justice.

The Ancient World of Western Literature (3) • • Mediterranean civilization began not on the coasts but east and south of the sea: Babylon and Egypt (in the valleys of Euphrates and Tigris rivers and in the valley of the Nile). However, the cultural history of the ancient world came to medieval and Renaissance Europe not in the languages of Babylon and Egypt but in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

The Ancient World of Western Literature (4) • The cultures of the ancient world passed down to later ages were dominated by two major traditions: • the Greco-Roman (Pantheist) tradition and • the Judeo-Christian (Monotheist) tradition.

The Hebrews (1) • • The Hebrews progressed from their beginnings as a pastoral tribe to their high point as a kingdom with a splendid capital in Jerusalem. Their later history was a bitter and unsuccessful struggle for freedom against foreign masters—Babylon, Greek, and Roman.

The Hebrews (2) • • After the period of the great kings David and Solomon (1005 -925 B. C. E. ), the kingdom fell apart again into warring factions. The period of exile (the deportation of the population to Babylon, 586 -539 B. C. E. ) was a formative for Hebrew religious thought.

The Hebrews (3) • • The return to Palestine was crowned by the rebuilding of the Temple and the creation of the canonical version of the Pentateuch or Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Around 300 B. C. E. Palestine became part of a Hellenistic Greek-speakingdom, and was absorbed by the Roman Empire in 63 B. C. E.

The Hebrews (4) • • A second revolt against the Roman Empire resulted in the diaspora, the “scattering” of the Hebrew people. The Hebrew people remained stateless until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The religious literature of the ancient Hebrews was probably written down between the 8 th and the 2 nd centuries B. C. E. It is founded on the idea of one God, the creator of all things, all-powerful and just.

The Greeks (1) • • • The origin of the peoples who called themselves Hellenes is still a mystery. The language they spoke belongs to the Indo -European family. The second millennium B. C. E. saw a brilliant culture, called Minoan after the mythical king Minos, flourishing on the large island of Crete.

The Greeks (2) • • • The citadel of Mycenae and the palace at Pylos show that mainland Greece had centers of wealth and power. In the last century of the 2 nd millennium, the great palaces were destroyed by fire. With them disappeared not only the Mycenean arts and skills but even the system of writing.

The Greeks (3) • • For the next few hundred years the Greeks were illiterate; this period is called the Dark Age of Greece. It produced a body of oral epic poetry that was the raw material Homer shaped into two great poems, the Iliad and Odyssey. They became the basis of an education and of a whole culture. The great characters of the epic serve as models of conduct for later generations of Greeks.

The Greeks (4) • • • The Hebrew conception of God emphasizes those aspects of the universe that imply a harmonious order; the Greeks conceived their gods as an expression of the disorder of the world in which they lived. The Olympian gods in Homer’s epics represented the blind forces of the universe. Morality is a human creation.

The Greeks (5) • • There is a double standard, one for gods and one for mortals. Homer imposed on Greek literature the anthropocentric emphasis that is its distinguishing mark and its great contribution to the Western mind. The stories told in Homer’s poems are set in the 12 th century B. C. E. They were probably written between the 10 th and the 8 th B. C. E (the so-called Dark Age).

The Greeks (6) • • The Dark Age was the time which saw the growth of many small independent cities. These cities differed from each other in custom, political constitution, and even dialect. They were constantly at war with one another. It was in the cities founded on the Asian coast that the Greeks adapted to their own language the Phoenician system of writing, adding signs for the vowels to create their alphabet.

The Greeks (7) • • • Literacy became a general condition all over the Greek world in the 7 th century B. C. E. By the beginning of the 5 th century B. C. E. , the two most prominent city-state were Athens and Sparta. These two cities led the combined Greek resistance to the Persian invasion in the years 490 -479 B. C. E.

The Greeks (8) • • Athens at this time was a democracy and the leader of a naval alliance. Sparta was rigidly conservative in government and policy. Its citizens were reared and trained for war, and its land army was superior to any other in Greece. These two cities became enemies when the external danger was eliminated.

The Greeks (9) • • • The war between these two cities, known as the Peloponnesian War, began in 431 B. C. E. and ended in 404 B. C. E. with the total defeat of Athens. By the end of the 5 th century B. C. E. Athens was divided internally as well as defeated externally. An intellectual revolution occurred; it was a critical reevaluation of accepted ideas in every sphere of thought and action.

The Greeks (10) • • • Democratic institutions had created a demand for an education that would prepare men for public life. The demand was met by the appearance of the professional teacher, the Sophist. The Sophists were great teachers; they produced a generation that had been trained to see both sides of any question and to argue the weaker side as effectively as the stronger, the false as effectively as the true.

The Greeks (11) • • • The Sophists taught how to argue inferentially from probability in the absence of concrete evidence, to appeal to the audience’s sense of its own advantage rather than to accept moral standards. The Sophist methods dominated the thinking of the Athenians of the 5 th and 4 th centuries B. C. E. Human reason became a critical weapon for an attack on myth and on traditional conceptions of the gods.

The Greek (12) • • • The shifts in worldview and moral beliefs led to new forms of creativity in art, literature, and thought. In the last quarter of the 5 th century B. C. E. , Plato and Aristotle revolutionized philosophy and laid the foundations for later ancient and European philosophical thought. Their predecessor is Socrates.

The Greeks (13) • • • Socrates used “dialectic, ” a search for truth through questions and answers, to discuss the nature of justice, of truth, and of piety. He believed in absolute standards and believed that they could be discovered by a process of logical inquiry and supported by logical proof. The Athenians sentenced him to death on a charge of impiety.

The Greeks (14) • • In the next century Athens became the center for a large group of philosophical schools, all ot them claiming to develop and interpret the ideas of Socrates. When Alexander the Great died at Babylon in 323 B. C. E. , his empire broke up into a number of independent kingdoms ruled by his generals; modern scholars refer to this period (323 -31 B. C. E. ) as the Hellenistic Age.

The Greeks (15) • • One of his generals, Ptolemy, founded a Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt. At Alexandria in Egypt, the Ptolemies formed a Greek library to preserve the texts of Greek literature.

Rome (1) • • When Alexander died, the city of Rome was engaged in a struggle for the control of the surrounding areas. There were three Carthaginian (or Punic) Wars between Rome and Carthage. Rome emerged from the second Punic War (218 -201 B. C. E. ) not merely victorious but a world power. By the end of the first century B. C. E. , Rome was the capital of a great empire.

Rome (2) • • This empire gave peace and orderly government to the Mediterranean area for the next two centuries. When it finally went down, the empire left behind it the ideal of the world-state, an ideal that was to be taken over by the medieval church, which ruled from the same center, Rome, and which claimed a spiritual authority as great as the secular authority it replaced.

Rome (3) • • The great body of Roman law is one of the Romans’ greatest contributions to Western civilization. The quality Romans most admired was gravitas, seriousness of attitude and purpose. Latin literature began with a translation of the Odyssey, made by a Greek prisoner of war. With the exception of satire, until Latin literature became Christian the model was always Greek.

Rome (4) • • • While the Roman empire flourished in the 2 nd century C. E. , the old religion offered no comfort to those who looked beyond mere material ends. New religions arose or were imported from the East. The worship of the Hebrew prophet Jesus finally triumphed and became the official and later the exclusive religion of the Roman world.

Rome (5) • Under the never-ending invasions by peoples from the north, the church, with its center and spiritual head in Rome, converted the new inhabitants and so made possible the preservation of much of that Latin and Greek literature that was to serve the European Middle Ages and Renaissance as a model and a basis for their own great achievements in the arts and letters.

Source • The above points are abstracted from the chapter “The Ancient World” in The Norton Anthology of Western Literature: Vol. 1, The Ancient World through the Renaissance. 8 th ed. New York: Norton, 2006.