Cultural Ideals and Values of the Homeric Greek - Assignment Example

Cultural ideals and values of the Homeric Greek Around 1400 B.C. was an era where Mycenae, the traditional home of Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus and leader of the Greek warriors in Troy, dominated the mainland and his island of Crete assumed the political and militaric status of master of the eastern Mediterranean (Lawall & Maynard 15). A golden age of splendor arouse during this period, as shown by excavations of the royal graves at Mycenae, and the cultural and religious traditions of the eminent classical Greece began to take form. This is the Homeric or Heroic, Age - also called Mycenaean, or Late Minoan -for the culture and values of the latter part of this period are those permanently embodied in the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey (Lawall & Maynard 18). The fall of this age credited with the Dorian Invasion, which is believed to have happened around 1100 B.C., and which came to be the conclusive deathblow to the Minoan civilization (Lawall & Maynard 24). According to Greek legend, it was in this age that the Oedipus tragedy evolved, and the story later depicted in Aeschylus' Oresteia played out. This was the time of the famous Trojan War, which left the Trojans and Greeks alike bereft of some of their most beloved and courageous men who died as heroes on the incarnadine battle fields (Lawall & Maynard 34). This was the time of the wonderings of Aeneas and Odysseus after the war, and a time where the inhabitants of Mount Olympus interacted with the humans more than ever. Homer did not live during the time, which is named after him. He is believed to have lived three hundred years after the Homeric Age of which he wrote about in his epic poems (35). He is, of course, our most important literary source for knowledge of this period, combining the history, religion, myth, and lore of many generations (Lawall & Maynard 37). The political institutions of the Homeric Greeks were exceedingly primitive. Each little community of villages was independent of external control, but political authority was so tenuous that it would not be too much to say that the state scarcely existed at all. The king could not make or enforce laws or administer justice (Lawall & Maynard 45) He received no remuneration of any kind, but had to cultivate his farm for a living the same as any other citizen. Practically his only functions were military and priestly. He commanded the army in time of war and offered sacrifices to keep the gods on the good side of the community (Lawall & Maynard 48). Although each little group of villages had its council of nobles and assembly of warriors, of these bodies had neither any definite membership nor status as an organ of government. The duties of the former were to advise and assist the king and prevent him from usurping despotic powers. The functions of the latter were to ratify declarations of war and assent to the conclusion of peace (Lawall & Maynard 50). Almost without exception, custom took the place of law, and the administration of justice was private. Even willful murder was punishable only by the family of the victim. While it is true that the king for settlement, he acted in such cases merely as an arbitrator, not as a judge. As a matter of fact, the political consciousness of  the Greeks of this time was so poorly developed that they had no conception of government as an indispensable agency for the preservation of social order. When Odysseus, king of Ithaca , was absent for twenty years , no regent was appointed in his place , and no session of the council or assembly was held. No one seemed to think that the complete suspension of government, even for so long a time, was a matter of any critical importance. Just before the violent Doric invasions, the Achaeans fought the Trojans of Asia Minor. The chronicle of that war, the Iliad, furnishes the first clear picture of the early Greek religion as it evolved from a blending of Achaean, Dorian, Minoan, Egyptian, and Asian elements. This phase of Greek religion called Homeric, after the author of the Iliad, or Olympian, after Mount Olympus, the Thessalian mountain where the gods dwelled (Lawall & Maynard 53). The early Egyptian influences represented by half-human, half-animal deities vanished, and the Olympians were purely anthropomorphic figures. Zeus was the supreme lord of the skies, retaining his original Aryan importance; he shared his dominion with his two chthonic and pre-Aryan brothers, Hades, lord of the underworld, and Poseidon, lord of the waters. Through a vast set of myths and legends (the clearest illustration is Hesiod's Theogony ) the other gods and goddesses were carefully related to one another until a divine family was established with Zeus as its titular head. The Homeric pantheon was a tightly knit family group in charge of natural forces but not equal to the natural forces themselves. The gods had supernatural powers (particularly over human life), but their power was severely limited by a concept of fate (Moira) as the relentless force of destiny. The gods were not thought to be omnipresent, omniscient, or omnipotent. Shorn of the usual godly attributes, the Olympians often took on the property of being simply bigger than humans are, but not different or alien. The Olympians fought one another and often meddled in human affairs (Lawall & Maynard 57). The superhuman features of the Olympians were their immortality and their ability to reveal the future to humanity. The Greeks did not consider immortality a particularly enviable property. Action was crucial and exciting by the very fact of life's brevity, and people were expected to perform by their own particular heroic arete, or virtue (Lawall & Maynard 63) Death was unavoidable; the dead were impotent shades without consciousness, and there are only vague images of the Isles of the Blest in an Olympian world. The Greeks, however, did expect information about their future life on earth from the gods. Thus, divination was a central aspect of religious life. The Olympians were, perhaps, most important in their role as civic deities, and each of the Greek city-states came to consider one or more of the gods as its particular guardian. There were public cults that were devoted to insuring the city against plague, conquest, or want. The religious festival became the occasion for a great assembly of citizens and foreigners. (Lawall & Maynard 65). Athens and Sparta, the city-states destined to dominate the history of Greece during the classical period (the fifth and most of the fourth centuries B.C.), underwent markedly different developments during the period prior to 500 B.C. While Athens' political, economic, and social evolution was typical of most other Greek states, Sparta's development produced a unique way of life that elicited the wonder and often the admiration of other Greeks. During the seventh century B.C., the council of nobles became supreme in Athens. The popular assembly no longer met, and the king was replaced by nine aristocratic magistrates, called archons, chosen annually by the council to exercise the king's civil, military, and religious powers. While the nobles on their large estates prospered, the small farmers and sharecroppers suffered. Bad years forced them to borrow seed from their rich neighbors, and when they were unable to repay they were sold into slavery. To the small farmers' clamor for the cancellation of debts and the end to debt slavery was added the voice of the landless for the redistribution of land (Lawall & Maynard 72). Socrates developed the dialectic method: a search for truth through questions and answers. Greek culture spread though the known world in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great. By the middle of the third century B.C.E., Rome dominated Italy, and victory in the Punic Wars against Carthage turned Rome into a world power (Lawall & Maynard 74). By the end of the first century B.C.E., the Roman Empire stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to Mesopotamia and the frontiers of Palestine and as far north as Britain, and created the concept of the world-state. The Romans brought peace, orderly government, a talent for practical affairs, and a belief that the strongest authority was “the custom of predecessors” to conquered territories (Lawall & Maynard 78). Augustus, the first Roman emperor, brought the empire under one authority and ushered in a long age of peace and reconstruction with his victory at Actium against Mark Antony. In the third and fourth centuries C.E., the empire disintegrated under constant invasions from people from the north (Lawall & Maynard 85). Through the Hellenistic contact with non-Greek people, Judaism flourished in Alexandria. The philosophies of Cynicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism influenced Roman culture. Thomas Aquinas’s “Neo-Platonism” synthesized Christian doctrine with Platonic teachings (Lawall & Maynard 86). Eventually, Christianity would emerge victorious over the ancient world’s disparate religious practices and beliefs. Hebrews left a religious literature founded on the idea of one God, creator of all things, all-powerful and just a revolutionary concept. Early Greek culture produced a body of oral epic poetry; raw material for Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Lawall & Maynard 97). The great characters of the Homeric epics served as models of conduct for later generations of Greeks. The Olympian gods retained the attributes set down by Homer. Latin literature began with a translation of the Odyssey; with the exception of satire, the literary model was always Greek. Virgil based the Aeneid on Homer and glorified the beginnings of Rome as a world power. Satire, exemplified by Petronius’s Satyricon, painted a sardonic portrait of the nouveau riche for whom religion had lost its meaning (Lawall & Maynard 104). In conclusion, the Homeric moral­ity rested upon no basis of supernatural sanctions. Perhaps its true foundation was military. Nearly all the virtues extolled in the epics were those which would make the individual a better soldier bravery, self-control, patriotism, wisdom (in the sense of cunning), love of one's friends, and hatred of one's enemies. There was no conception of sin in the Christian sense of wrongful acts to be repented of or atoned for. It was there that the essential qualities, which distinguish the modern from the ancient and the mediaeval world, were developed Works Cited Lawall, Sarah N., and Maynard Mack. The Norton anthology of world masterpieces, the Western tradition Literature of western culture through the Renaissance. 7th ed. New York: Norton, 1999. Print. Read More