Tag Archives: Ancient Greece

Who Is the Happiest Man?

03 Saturday Oct 2015

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Herodotus

“Croesus, king of Lydia, asked him as follows: ‘Athenian guest, much report of thee has come to us, both in regard to thy wisdom and thy wanderings… a desire has come upon me to ask whether thou hast seen any whom thou deem to be of all men the most happy.’ This he asked supposing that he himself was the happiest of men; but Solon, using no flattery but the truth only, said: ‘Yes, O king, Tellos the Athenian.’

Croesus, marveling at that which he said, asked him earnestly, ‘In what respect dost thou judge Tellos to be the most happy?’ And he said: ‘Tellos, in the first place, living while his native State was prosperous, had sons fair and good and saw from all of them children begotten and living to grow up; and secondly he had what with us is accounted wealth, and after his life a most glorious end. For when a battle was fought by the Athenians at Eleusis against the neighbouring people, he brought up supports and routed the foe and there died by a most fair death; and his people buried him publicly where he fell, and honoured him greatly.’ […]

Croesus was moved to anger and said: ‘Athenian guest, hast thou then so cast aside our prosperous state as worth nothing, that thou dost prefer to us even men of private station?’ And he said: ‘Croesus, thou art inquiring about human fortunes of one who well knows that fate is apt to disturb our lot. For in the course of long time a man may see many things which he would not desire to see, and suffer also many things which he would not desire to suffer… As for thee, I perceive that thou art both great in wealth and king of many men, but that of which thou didst ask me I cannot call thee yet, until I learn that thou hast brought thy life to a fair ending: for the very rich man is not at all to be accounted more happy than he who has but his subsistence from day-to-day, unless also the fortune go with him to possess things of value. For many very wealthy men are not happy, while many who have but a moderate living are fortunate… But we must of every thing examine the end and how it will turn out at the last, for to many fate shows but a glimpse of happiness and then plucks them up by the roots and overturns them.'”

__________

Excerpted from the opening third of Herodtus’s The Histories, the only surviving work of the earliest known historian. (The excerpt is from the at-times haughtier G.C. Macauley version, which lends some gravity to sections like the one above. I haven’t read Tom Holland’s translation, but I assume it’s the best vernacular version out there.)

In The Histories, Herodotus notes that Croesus is a “Lydian by race,” a “ruler of the nations between the Syrians and the Paphlagonians,” and the “first Barbarian of whom we have knowledge.”

Read on:

Alexander’s Horse

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

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Ranch - Thanksgiving 3

“There came a day when Philoneicus the Thessalian brought Philip (Alexander’s father) a horse named Bucephalus. The king and his friends went down to the plain to watch the horse’s trials, and came to the conclusion that he was wild and unmanageable, for he would allow no one to mount him. The king became angry at being offered such a vicious animal unbroken, and ordered it to be led away.

But Alexander, who was standing close by, remarked, ‘What a horse they are losing, and all because they don’t know how to handle him, or dare not try.’…

Alexander went quickly up to Bucephalus, took hold of his bridle, and turned him towards the sun, for he had noticed that the horse was shying at the sight of his own shadow, as it fell in front of him and constantly moved whenever he did. He ran alongside the animal for a little way, calming him down by stroking him, and then, when he saw he was full of spirit and courage, he quietly threw aside his cloak with a light spring vaulted safely on to his back… Finally, when he saw that the horse was free of his fears and impatient to show his speed, he gave him his reigns and urged him forward.

At First Philip and his friends held their breath until they saw Alexander reach the end of his gallop, turn in full control, and ride back triumphant. Thereupon the rest of the company broke into loud applause, while his father, we are told, actually wept for joy, and when Alexander had dismounted he kissed him and said, ‘My boy, you must find a kingdom big enough for your ambitions. Macedonia is too small for you.'”

__________

A modern translation of the semi-mythic story “Alexander Tames Bucephalus” by Plutarch. This event would have occurred in 344 BC, when Alexander was 13.

Bucephalus, which means “ox head,” is the most famous horse of antiquity. According to his extensive wiki, he was black with a white star; his massive head, which would have been the foremost point of the charging Grecian army, was cast into busts and adorned some of the currency of the Greek empire in the century following his death.

Two more excerpts:

When Alexander’s sarcophagus was brought from its shrine, Augustus gazed at the body, then laid a crown of gold on its glass case and scattered some flowers to pay his respects. When they asked if he would like to see Ptolemy too, ‘I wished to see a king,’ he replied, ‘I did not wish to see corpses.’
Suetonius, Life of Augustus (121 AD)

As for the exact thoughts in Alexander’s mind, I am neither able nor concerned to guess them, but this I think I can state, that nothing common or mean would have been his intention; he would not have remained content with any of his conquests, not even if he had added the British Isles to Europe; he would always have searched beyond for something unknown, and if there had been no other competition, he would have competed against himself.
Arrian, History of Alexander’s Expeditions (140 AD)

One more post:

Plutarch: Politics as a Way of Life

23 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Politics

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Roman Bust

“They are wrong who think that politics is like an ocean voyage or a military campaign, something to be done with some particular end in view, something which leaves off as soon as that end is reached. It is not a public chore, to be got over with. It is a way of life. It is the life of a domesticated political and social creature who is born with a love for public life, with a desire for honor, with a feeling for his fellows; and it lasts as long as need be.

It is not simply office holding, not just keeping your place, not just raising your voice from the floor, not just ranting on the rostrum with speeches and motions; which is what many people think politics is; just as they think of course you are a philosopher if you sit in a chair and lecture, or if you are able to carry through a dispute over a book. The even and consistent, day in day out, work and practice of both politics and philosophy escape them.

Politics and philosophy are alike. Socrates neither set out benches for his students, nor sat on a platform, nor set hours for his lectures. He was philosophizing all the time — while he was joking, while he was drinking, while he was soldiering, whenever he met you on the street, and in the end when he was in prison and drinking the poison. He was the first to show that all your life, all the time, in everything you do, whatever you are doing, is the time for philosophy. And so also it is of politics.”

__________

From Plutarch’s Lives, written in the first century.

I was invited by my professor and friend Jeffry Burnam to sit in last night on a discussion between former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and a small group of Georgetown graduate students.

Our conversation centered mostly on healthcare, though it was prefaced by Daschle’s 20-or-so-minute rundown of the modern history of the U.S. senate, specifically its recent drift towards sectarianism — what I call the centrifugal force of the new century. While basic, Daschle’s summary of this trend as well as its causes was as cogent and as elegantly phrased as any I have heard. It began with a sociological survey à la Bill Bishop (The Big Sort) and Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone), then moved on to the electoral and procedural questions raised by Morris P. Fiorina (Culture War?), Frances Lee (Beyond Ideology), and David Mayhew (Congress: The Electoral Connection), among others. Despite the breadth and depth of these issues, Daschle barely missed a word in 20 minutes.

Moreover Daschle has a way of orienting himself to people, especially students, in a manner that is simultaneously distinguished and disarming. Through his trademark red-rimmed specs, more befitting a painter than a politician, Daschle’s eyes alighted patiently on each student at the table as he strung together sharp responses to the variety of questions asked over almost three hours. I used to record meetings like this, back when I was a student. I wish I’d done so last night.

I say this to point out that while you may or may not agree with my characterization of this particular politician, politics itself is not something only done by those officials who sit in the Capital (or more like fundraise in their home districts, given that — as Daschle pointed out — the Senate is only in session 109 days this year: ~9 days of work/month). Instead, the Greek conception of public service and public policy is ultimately the correct one; as John F. Kennedy remarked in 1960, while reflecting on the roots of his interest in government, “I saw how ideally politics filled the Greek definition of happiness — ‘a full use of your powers along lines of excellence.'” It is, properly conceived, the furthest thing from a profession.

At the start of his talk, Daschle said that, as a legislator, he made decisions based on three considerations: What do my constituents want? What do I think is right? And what do the experts tell me? He then asked the class to imagine the entire United States population, all 310 million of us, in a giant football stadium — all voicing our particular proposed solutions to what we see as the nation’s problems. The former Majority Leader equated this with the current political landscape in the United States: everyone involved to some extent, though some sitting closer to the playing field than others. While this arrangement seems imperfect, messy, even repellent, he argued, it’s far superior to those states in which conversation is stifled, monopolized — or worse, silenced.

Tom Daschle

The Christian Worldview Versus the Greek

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion

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Raphael's School of Athens

“The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God, a lifetime journey in which a human being was invited to unite himself to God by imitating God’s justice and mercy. It was far more individualized than anything the Greeks had ever come up with and stressed the experience of a call, a personal vocation, a unique destiny for each human being. The one God of the Jews had created the world and everyone in it, and God would bring the world to its end. There was no eternal cosmos, circling round and round. Time is real, not cyclical; it does not repeat itself but proceeds forward inexorably, which makes each moment—and the decisions I make each moment—precious. I am not merely an instance of Man, I am this particular, unrepeatable man, who never existed before and will never exist again. I create a real future in the present by what I do now. Whereas fate was central to Greeks and Romans, hope is central to Jews and Christians. Anyone who doubts the great gulf between these two worldviews has only to reread the speeches Hector makes to Andromache (in Chapter I) and to realize the impossibility of putting such speeches on the lips of any believing Jew or Christian:

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

__________

From chapter 7 of Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.

Any loyal visitor to this blog will be aware that much of my reading over the past year has orbited around the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem. Fideism, which has been the most compelling idea I have encountered in that time, explicitly locates itself in the murky terrain between — or above — faith and reason. I’ve not forgotten that I’m past deadline on some paragraphs about this subject and the other central themes of the past year, and I can only excuse my laziness by saying that part of my distraction has come in the form of Cahill’s incredible book.

I find this particular section pretty intriguing, and though I’ve been mulling it over for the past few days, am not exactly sure what to make of it. In the context of Cahill’s entire narrative it takes on some added shadows and contours, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll merely supplement it with a selection from Arthur Schlesinger’s biography of Robert Kennedy, in which he writes the following about Robert’s spiritual response to his brother’s death:

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy…

The fact that [Robert] found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.’

Hence, the Greek emphasis on fate, which was the foundation of Robert’s reflexive view of the world, absorbed tragedy as an unavoidable consequence of the unchangeable cards one is dealt in life. On the contrary, the Christian perspective, with its emphasis on hope (and its cousin possibility), assessed negative events with an eye to past decisions and potential future choices: not only could it have been different, but I now can choose how to react.

Read another fragment from Cahill’s book:

Greek SymposiaPartying with the Greeks

The Top 5 Posts from the Greeks and the Romans in 2013

08 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in History, Philosophy

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Greek Bust

The top 5, in order:

1. Partying with the Greeks by Thomas Cahill (from Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter)

I think any twenty-first century American could be forgiven for reading Cahill’s version of the Greeks and their symposia with a certain amount of identification. On a more personal level, the reflections of Archilochus accord with many of the transient, recurring thoughts and melancholic moods I’ve had while leaving parties in the early hours of the morning.

2. The Odyssey Home by Homer (from The Odyssey)

During a year in which I read heavily about war and its million unseen impacts, especially those which are felt at home, Homer’s Odyssey provided, among other things, insight into some eternal truths about military conflict. While the opening stave is by no means the strongest section of the text, it is probably the best summary of the Odyssey’s basic plot line and themes. It’s also a stark, dramatic introduction to Odysseus, one of the great heroes in fiction.

3. The Discourses of Epictetus by Arrian (from The Handbook of Epictetus)

A stirring argument for two distinctly Aristotelian insights: practice moderation in all things and make the most of your days. These exhortations are especially noteworthy when one considers the guy speaking them was born a slave.

4. Do Not Act as If You Were Going to Live Ten Thousand Years by Marcus Aurelius (from The Meditations)

This is nothing you haven’t read before, though it’s still essential, because in addition to bering one of the first to say it, Marcus Aurelius was also one of the best. It’s especially worth noting his nod to Heraclitus in the image of time as a river that is forever flowing.

5. Friends with Socrates by Xenophon (from Memorabilia)

It’s amusing to read an epistemic breakdown of something as delicate and natural as friendship. Still, Socrates’s voice here is at its most eccentric and convincing, as he explains how exactly relationships with others can come to result in non-zero sum paradigms.

Partying with the Greeks

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in History

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Greek Symposia

“Banquets of like-minded friends were called symposia. (The singular, symposium—the Greek original is symposion—means ‘a drinking together,’ that is, a drinking party.)…

There was plenty of tension in Greek life, since the Greeks, however many parties they threw, became as time went on even more bellicose than they had been in Homer’s day. These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—’the father of all, the king of all,’ ‘always existing by nature,’ as the Greek philosophers expressed it. Enough wine and one could forget about the war of the moment or, if not forget, reduce its importance at least temporarily. Thus this ditty attributed to Theognis, an early-sixth-century songwriter of airy facility who believed in good breeding, great parties, and lively romance, the Cole Porter of ancient Greece:

Strike the sacred strings and let us drink,
and so disport ourselves ’mid sounding reeds
that our libations gratify the gods—
and who gives a shit about war with the Medes

But as tends to be the case when drunkenness substitutes for thoughtfulness, the hilarity often ended badly… There’s sadness beneath the merriment. It is as if, no matter how much these revelers sing, dance, howl, recite their jokes, and screw one another, a constant, authoritative note of pessimistic pain sounds beyond all their frantic attempts not to hear it. Even Archilochus, a sensational athlete in his time and a master of the revels if ever there was one, cannot deny that none of these nighttime activities makes good sense. In his most thoughtful lines, he seems to remove the mask, denuding himself of his gruff and rollicking persona, and to counsel himself in the clear light of day not to excess but to sobriety—to balance, modesty, and even resignation:

O heart, my heart, no public leaping when you win;
no solitude nor weeping when you fail to prove.
Rejoice at simple things; and be but vexed by sin
and evil slightly. Know the tides through which we move.

The last sentence is quietly ominous. The tides through which we move—the highs and the lows, the peaks and the troughs—tell us repeatedly that nothing lasts… Let us temper our excitement and agitation, whether for the ecstasy of battle or the ecstasy of sex, whether over great achievement or great loss, and admit to ourselves that all things have their moment… If we live according to this sober knowledge, we will live as well as we can.”

Archilochus

__________

From the closing of chapter 3 of Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.

I wrote some comments about the above bust of Archilochus in a post yesterday. Check it out, as well as the sources (brought to my attention by Ted Rey) of the lines from Archilochus cited above.

Know the Tides

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by in History

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Archilochus

O heart, my heart, no public leaping when you win;
no solitude nor weeping when you fail to prove.
Rejoice at simple things; and be but vexed by sin
and evil slightly. Know the tides through which we move.

__________

Words by Archilochus, the celebrated Greek poet who wrote and lived in the seventh century BC.

I just came across these lines in Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, and though I’ve tried to track them down on the internet, am still yet to find their original source. Send me a message or post a comment if you happen to know.

The above bust is of Archilochus. It is a first or second century AD marble sculpture based on an original dating from the late third century BC.

The ivy crown adorning his head signifies he is a poet, while the berries symbolize the gifts of Dionysus. Art historians believe this to be Archilochus due to the similarities it shares with four other Roman copies as well as a silver coin from Paros, which shows the poet seated, holding a lyre. Though he began his adult life as a mercenary, Archilochus eventually became one of the most famous lyric poets of Antiquity. His poems, of which only fragments of remnants remain, principally concern love, war, and the revelries of the table.

Sometime this weekend I’ll post the context in which Cahill quotes this verse. It’s pretty unexpected. Pick up the book here if you can’t wait.

*Update: This morning, reader Ted Rey responded to my question and found the source of the above quote from Archilochus. Ted writes:

“It seems to be an alternate translation for Fragment 67, as translated by R. Lattimore

Heart, my heart, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength,
up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault
of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beamlike spears.
Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show,
nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry.
Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree you
give way to sorrow. All our life is up-and-down like this.

The war motif has been bypassed. I like the more generalized message that emerges.

Another translation is:

Soul, my soul, don’t let them break you,
all these troubles. Never yield:
though their force is overwhelming,
up! attack them shield to shield…

Take the joy and bear the sorrow,
looking past your hopes and fears:
learn to recognize the measured
dance that orders all our years.

Archilochus: To His Soul : A Fragment, as translated from the Greek by Jon Corelis”

Thanks for that, Ted. Much appreciated.

If

04 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by in History, War

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Philip II of Macedon

“Philip II of Macedon was the father of Alexander the Great. His son would one day conquer the known world, but Philip was, in his own right, a brilliant military leader who set about conquering each of the city-states of ancient Greece. Well, almost all.

Sparta, on the southernmost tip of the land Philip sought to control, was a military powerhouse — a strict martial culture known for its brutal prowess. In 346 B.C, Philip sent a message to intimidate the Spartans. ‘You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army on your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people and raze your city.’ The term ‘Laconic wit,’ comes from the Spartan region Laconia. The Spartans employed it to great effect with their one word response to Philip: ‘If.’

Philip never attempted to conquer Sparta.”

__________

A modern translation from Plutarch’s De Garrulitate (“On Talkativeness”). Find it in his Collected Essays.

The photograph is of a fragment of a statuette of Philip II of Macedon.