Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The first farmers appear to have settled around Thessalonika, in the north of Greece, about 6500 BC. The Greek language is believed to have been brought to the area not before 2500 BC, possibly by invading Aryan-type people from the Russian steppes. (In other words, similar people to those who invaded northern India at much the same time.) Until at least 2000 BC, the prosperous towns of Greece were still unfortified, though bronze daggers began to lengthen into swords.⁵

Greece is a very broken-up country, with many islands and several peninsulas, which may have influenced the development there of the city-state. Kingship, and the aristocratic hero culture, which in Homer is the universal political arrangement, had vanished from most cities by the dawn of history (roughly 700 BC). The experience of Athens shows why – and how – monarchy was abolished.⁶ The first encroachment on the royal prerogative took place when the nobles elected a separate war chief, the Archon, because the priestly king of the time was not a fighter. This was followed by the promotion of the Archon over the king. According to tradition, the first Archon was Medon, who held office for life, and his family after him. The king lost power but he continued to be the city’s chief priest. Legal duties were divided: the Archon took cases concerning property, whereas the king tried religious cases and homicide. Thus there are parallels here with what was happening in Mesopotamia.⁷

War was also the background to a set of stories that became central to Greek self-consciousness, and the first written masterpieces of Western literature. They concerned the Achaean (i.e., Mycenean) expedition to Troy, a city in Asia Minor (now Turkey). Homer’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are often described as the earliest literature, the ‘primary source’ from which all European literature derives, the ‘gateway’ to new avenues of thought. Between them they contain around 28,000 lines and preceding their appearance and for hundreds of years following them, ‘there is nothing remotely resembling these amazing achievements’. Homer’s genius was recognised in Greece from the very beginning. Athenians referred to his books the way devout Christians nowadays refer to the Bible, or Muslims to the Qurʾan. Socrates quoted lines from the Iliad when he was on trial for his life.⁸

One important thing to say about these achievements is how very different they are from the early biblical narratives, which most scholars now accept as having been composed at more or less the same time. The Hebrew Bible, as we shall see in the next chapter, is the fruit of many hands but concerns itself with one theme: the history of the Israelites and what that reveals about God’s purpose. It is a history of ordinary mortals, essentially small, everyday people, trying to understand the divine will. Other nations, other peoples, worship different gods and that puts them in the wrong: they deserve – and receive – no sympathy. In strong contrast, Homer’s epics do not concern ordinary people so much as heroes and the gods themselves, who enshrine excellence in one form or another. But the stories are not really histories. They are more like modern novels which take an episode and examine it in detail for what it reveals about human nature. In Horace’s words, Homer plunges in, in medias res, in the middle of things. But in Homer the gods are not ‘unknowable’. They are in fact all too human, with human problems and failings. No less significantly, in Homer, the heroes’ enemies are themselves heroes, treated with sympathy at times, allowed their own dignity and honour. In composing his epics, Homer drew upon a vast number of poems and songs that had been transmitted orally for generations. They depended on myths and mythos, in Greek, from which the English word ‘myth’ derives, actually meant ‘word’, in the sense of ‘the last word’, a final pronouncement. This contrasted with logos, which also meant ‘word’ but in the sense of a truth which can be argued and maybe changed (as in, ‘what’s the word on . . .?’). Unlike logoi, which were written in prose, myths were recorded in verse.

The stories of Homer are in some ways the first ‘modern’ narratives. His characters are fully rounded, three-dimensional, with weaknesses as well as strengths, with differing motives and emotions, courageous at one moment, hesitant the next, more like real people than gods. Women are treated as sympathetically – and as fully – as men: for example, in Helen we see that beauty can be a curse as much as a blessing. Above all, as the story unfolds, Odysseus learns – his character develops – making him more interesting, and more dignified, than the deities. Odysseus shows himself as capable of rational thought, independent of the gods.