Greek Civilization Ascent

Greek Civilization Ascent Nothing in all of history is more unexpected or challenging to explain as the abrupt ascent of Greek culture. A large portion of civilization was already there in Egypt and Mesopotamia thousands of years ago, and it eventually extended to nearby nations. But until the Greeks provided them, several components had been absent. Everyone is aware of their accomplishments in literature and the arts, but what they accomplished in the strictly intellectual sphere is even more remarkable. They were the ones who created science, philosophy, and mathematics*. They also wrote history instead of just chronicling events; and they were unrestricted in their speculations on the nature of the universe and the afterlife by inherited orthodoxies. Men were willing, until very recently, to gape and talk mystically about the Greek genius because of how astounding what had happened was. But it is feasible and worthwhile to examine the evolution of Greece from a scientific perspective. The history of philosophy starts with Thales, who is nicely dated by the fact that he foresaw an eclipse that happened in 585 B.C., according to astronomers. Thus, philosophy and science were born simultaneously at the start of the sixth century, as they were never distinct. What was going on in Greece and the surrounding nations prior to this? Any response must be somewhat speculative, but in the last century, archaeology has provided us with a great deal more information than our grandfathers did. Writing was developed in Babylonia not too long after it was discovered in Egypt in 4000 B.C. Each nation's writing tradition started with images of the intended items. Ideograms, which are still used in China to represent words, swiftly gained ubiquity as a result of these images. Over countless years, this complicated method gave rise to alphabetic writing. The Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates were major factors in the early development of civilization in Egypt and Mesopotamia because they made cultivation simple and extremely successful. The culture had many similarities to that discovered by the Spaniards in Peru and Mexico. There there existed a celestial ruler who ruled over all of Egypt with absolute authority. The monarch had a particularly close relationship with the supreme god of a polytheistic faith. There was an aristocracy in the armed forces as well as among priests. When the king was weak or fighting a hard battle, the latter was frequently able to intrude on the royal authority. The monarch, the nobility, or the clergy were the groups of people who farmed the land; these people were known as serfs. The theologies of the Babylonians and Egyptians differed greatly. The underworld is where the souls of the deceased go after death, according to Egyptian belief, and Osiris judges them based on how they lived their earthly lives. Because they believed that the spirit will eventually return to the body, they practiced mummification and built elaborate tombs. A number of monarchs constructed the pyramids at the end of the fourth millennium B.C. and also the start of the third. After this point, religious conservatism prevented advancement and Egyptian society became increasingly stereotypical. Around 1800 B.C. Semites under the name of Hyksos overthrew Egypt, and he governed the nation for almost 200 years. Although they did not have a lasting impact on Egypt, their presence there must have contributed to the spread of Egyptian culture to Palestine and Syria. Compared to Egypt, Babylonia developed more as a warlike nation. Originally, a race whose origins are unclear called "Sumerians" ruled instead of Semites. They created cuneiform script, which the Semites who invaded later adopted. There was a time when several separate towns engaged in warfare with one another, but ultimately Babylon emerged victorious and created an empire. Other towns' gods submitted to Marduk, the deity of Babylon, who subsequently ascended to the same place in the Greek pantheon as Zeus. Egypt had experienced something similar, but much earlier. Like other ancient faiths, the religions of Egypt and Babylonia originated as fertility cults. The sun was masculine, and the earth was female. Traditionally, the bull was associated with male fertility, and there were several bull-gods. The earth goddess Ishtar had the highest rank among all female deities in Babylon. The Great Mother was revered by people in western Asia under a variety of titles. Greek colonists in Asia Minor discovered temples dedicated to her, renaming her Artemis and assuming control of the pre-existing religion. This is the story of "Diana of the Ephesians." * Christianity turned her into the Virgin Mary, and the term "Mother of God" was officially approved of Our Lady at the Council of Ephesus. When a religion was associated with an empire's governance, political considerations significantly altered its basic characteristics. A deity or goddess was identified with the State and was required to bestow not just a bountiful crop but also military triumph. The ritual and theology were refined by a wealthy priestly caste, who also assembled the many deities of the empire's constituent nations into a pantheon. The gods came to be connected with morality through their involvement with government. Since gods gave laws to their legislators, breaking the law was seen as impiety. The first recorded legal code comes from Hammurabi, the Babylonian monarch who lived around 2100 B.C. The king claimed that Marduk gave him this law. Throughout antiquity, the relationship between morality and religion grew closer. In contrast to Egyptian religion, Babylonian religion prioritized material wealth above eternal bliss. While not unique to Babylonia, astrology, divination, and magic were more advanced there than elsewhere, and it was mostly because to Babylon that they spread across later antiquity. Some scientific discoveries, such the division of the day into 24 hours and the circle into 360 degrees, as well as the identification of an eclipse cycle that allowed solar eclipses to be predicted with some degree of likelihood and lunar eclipses to be predicted with absolute certainty, originated in Babylon. Thales, as we shall see, obtained this Babylonian wisdom. Egypt and Mesopotamia were agricultural civilizations, but the neighboring countries were initially pastoral. With the growth of commerce, which was once nearly exclusively marine, a new component emerged. Up until around 1000 B.C., weapons were manufactured of bronze, and countries without access to the required metals had to rely on commerce or piracy to get them. Commerce was shown to be more successful in areas with relatively stable social and political situations, whereas piracy was only a temporary measure. The island of Crete appears to have been a trailblazer in trade. about eleven centuries, starting around 2500 B.C. Prior to 1400 B.C., Crete was home to the highly developed Minoan civilization. The remnants of Cretan art convey a sense of joy and opulence, in stark contrast to the frightful desolation found in Egyptian temples. Almost nothing was known about this significant civilization until to Sir Arthur Evans' and colleagues' explorations. It was a seafaring society that had strong ties to Egypt—with the exception of the Hyksos period. Egyptian images clearly demonstrate the significant trade that Cretan sailors conducted between Egypt and Crete; this trade peaked about 1500 B.C. Although there are numerous similarities between the Cretan religion and the religions of Syria and Asia Minor, there is a greater kinship with Egypt in Cretan art, which is remarkably vibrant and highly inventive. The so-called "palace of Minos" in Knossos served as the epicenter of the Cretan culture, and the traditions of classical Greece bore remnants of this structure. Magnificent Cretean palaces were demolished around the end of the fourteenth century B.C., most likely by Greek invaders. Our understanding of Cretan history is based on archeological evidence; the chronology is determined from Egyptian items found in Crete and Cretan things found in Egypt. The goddess, or goddesses, that the Cretans worshipped may have been many. The "Mistress of Animals," a huntress and perhaps the ancestor of the classical Artemis, was without a doubt the most important deity. * She or someone else was a mother as well; her little boy is the only male deity other than the "Master of Animals." There is some indication that there is a belief in a hereafter where, similar to Egyptian mythology, good acts earn rewards or punishments. However, based on their artistic output, the Cretans seem to have been a generally happy people who were not greatly burdened by dark beliefs. They enjoyed watching bullfights, where both male and female toreadors displayed incredible acrobatic skills. Sir Arthur Evans believes that the actors in the bullfights were members of the greatest aristocracy, and that the bullfights were religious festivities. The remaining images are really realistic and dynamic. The linear writing of the Cretans remains untranslated. Their cities were undefended, and they lived in peace at home. Sea power was undoubtedly used to protect them. Before the Minoan culture was destroyed, it expanded to the Greek mainland about 1600 B.C. and endured there through a series of progressive stages of decline until roughly 900 B.C. The Mycenaean culture on the mainland is identified by royal tombs and strongholds perched on hillsides, which exhibit a greater aversion to warfare than Crete did. Fortresses and tombs both continued to captivate the attention of ancient Greece. The antique artwork found in the palaces is either directly crafted by Cretans or closely resembles their creations. Homer portrays the Mycenaean culture as being through a mist of mythology. Regarding the Mycenaeans, there is a great deal of doubt. Did the Cretans' conquest account for their civilization? Were they an older native race, or did they speak Greek? There is no way to know for sure, but generally speaking it appears likely that they were Greek-speaking conquerors, or at the very least that the nobility was made up of fair-haired invaders from the North who carried the Greek language with them. * There were three waves of Greek settlers in Greece: the Ionians arrived first, followed by the Achaeans and finally the Dorians. Similar to how the Romans eventually assimilated Greek civilization, the Ionians seem to have embraced the Cretan society almost entirely despite being conquerors. However, the Achaeans, the Ionians' successors, disturbed and largely dispossessed them. The Hittite tablets discovered at Boghaz-Keui provide evidence that the Achaeans ruled over a sizable, well-organized empire in the fourteenth century B.C. The final Greek invaders, the Dorians, virtually destroyed the Mycenaean civilization, which had been decimated by the conflict of the Iomans and Achaeans. The ancient Indo-European religion of their forefathers was preserved by the Dorians, in contrast to earlier conquerors who had mostly embraced the Minoan religion. However, Mycenaean religion persisted, particularly among the poorer classes, and classical Greek religion combined the two. While the aforementioned story appears plausible, it is important to keep in mind that we are unsure of the Mycenaeans' Greek heritage. What is known is that their civilization declined, that iron surpassed bronze at some point, and that the Phoenicians briefly gained dominance over the sea. Some of the invaders settled down and turned to agriculture throughout the latter part of the Mycenaean era and after its conclusion, while others continued their journey, first into the islands and Asia Minor, then into Sicily and southern Italy, where they established towns dependent on marine trade. The Greeks produced their first really innovative contributions to civilization at these marine towns; Athens' supremacy emerged later and was closely linked to naval might. Greece's continental region is hilly and mostly unfruchtable. However, there are a lot of fertile valleys that are easily accessible to the sea but are isolated from one another by mountains and unable to communicate easily by land. Little, independent settlements that relied on agriculture and centered on a town that was usually near the sea emerged in these valleys. Under such conditions, it was only natural for people unable to subsist on land to turn to seafaring as soon as a community's population was too large for its internal resources. The mainland cities established colonies, frequently in areas where obtaining food was far simpler than it had been back home. The Greeks of Sicily, Asia Minor, and Italy were therefore far wealthier than those on the Greek mainland during the earliest periods of history. Greece's social systems varied greatly from region to region. In Sparta, a tiny nobility lived off the labor of subjugated serfs of a different race; in the less affluent agricultural areas, the majority of people were farmers who worked their own land with family support. However, the work of slaves—males in the mines, females in the textile industry—made the free people wealthy in areas where trade and industry thrived. These slaves were primarily taken in battle and came from the barbarian population that surrounded Ionia. Respectable women were more and more isolated as wealth increased; in later years, these ladies participated little in Spartan society and other civilized areas of Greek life. There was a pretty broad progression from monarchy to aristocracy and then from democracy to despotism. Unlike the rulers of Egypt and Babylonia, these monarchs were not absolute; instead, they received guidance from a Council of Elders and were not free to disregard tradition. "Tyranny" simply referred to the reign of a man whose claim to power was not inherited; it did not always imply terrible governance. "Democracy" meant that all people, including women and slaves, were in charge of the government. Being the wealthiest members of their individual plutocracies gave the early dictators, like the Medici, their position of authority. Their possession of gold and silver mines, which were rendered even more lucrative by the recently established system of coinage— which originated in the kingdom of Lydia, which borders Ionia—was frequently the source of their prosperity. * It appears that coinage dates back to just before 700 B.C. The development of writing was one of the most significant outcomes for the Greeks from trade or piracy—at first, the two are hardly distinguishable. There is no concrete proof that the Greeks learned to write until about the eleventh century B.C., despite the fact that writing had been used for thousands of years in Egypt and Babylonia and that the Minoan Cretans possessed a script (which has not been deciphered). They acquired the art from the Phoenicians, who, like the other Syrians, were influenced by both Egyptian and Babylonian cultures. Until the Greek towns of Ionia, Italy, and Sicily rose to prominence, they dominated marine trade. Syrians continued to write in Babylonian cuneiform in the fourteenth century when writing to the heretic Egyptian monarch Ikhnaton; however, Hiram of Tyre (969–936) employed the Phoenician alphabet, which most likely evolved from Egyptian script. The Egyptians wrote using only pictures at first. Eventually, the heavily conventionalized pictures began to represent syllables (the first syllables of the names of the objects pictured), and finally, single letters based on the idea that "A was an Archer who shot at a frog." * This final step, which the Phoenicians took rather than the Egyptians, gave the alphabet all its benefits. The Greeks modified the alphabet to fit their language, adopting vowels in place of simply consonants—a significant innovation—after borrowing from the Phoenicians. Without a doubt, the development of this practical writing technique accelerated the emergence of Greek culture. Homer was the first significant creation of the Hellenic culture. All information regarding Homer is speculative, but the consensus seems to be that he was not a single poet but rather a group of them. Between them, the Iliad and the Odyssey most likely took two centuries to finish; some estimate this to be between 750 and 550 B.C., while others maintain that "Homer" was almost finished by the end of the ninth century. * Peisistratus brought the Homeric poetry to Athens in their current form. He ruled (with breaks) from 560 to 527 B.C. The most crucial aspect of the Athenian youth's education was learning Homer by heart from his time onward. Homer did not have the same status in various regions of Greece, most notably in Sparta, until much later. Like the courtly tales of the later Middle Ages, the Homeric poetry express the viewpoint of a cultured nobility that rejects many beliefs that are still widely held by the general public as plebeian. Many of these beliefs resurfaced in much later eras. With the aid of anthropology, contemporary authors have concluded that Homer was, far from being a savage, an expurgator—a rationalizer of old myths from the eighteenth century—who championed an upper-class vision of urbane enlightenment. Homer's depiction of religion is around the Olympian gods, although the Greeks worshipped other deities as well, both during and after his lifetime. Other darker, more feral aspects of popular religion were contained by the finest Greek intellect, only to lurk and attack in times of fear or weakness. Beliefs that Homer had cast aside during the decadence turned out to have endured, albeit half-buried, throughout the classical era. Numerous occurrences that might otherwise seem unexpected and incongruous are explained by this truth. Everywhere, tribal rather than personal religion predominated. A set of customs were carried out with the intention of using sympathetic magic to advance the tribe's goals, particularly with regard to human, animal, and vegetable fertility. It was necessary to induce the sun to stop waning at the winter solstice; similar rituals were also required for the spring and harvest. These frequently created a powerful sensation of group exhilaration, when people lost their sense of individuality and felt completely one with the tribe. During a certain period in the evolution of religion, humans and holy animals were ritually slain and consumed around the world. This stage happened at rather various dates in different parts of the country. Human sacrifice often persisted longer than the sacrificial consumption of human victims; at the start of history, it was still practiced in Greece. All around Greece, fertility ceremonies without such brutal elements were customary; the symbolism of the Eleusinian mysteries, in instance, was primarily agrarian. It is a fact that Homer does not really deal with religion. The gods are superhuman beings with immortality; they are entirely human in every other way. They are morally indefensible, and it is hard to see how they could have aroused such awe. There are sections that are considered to be late, yet they are handled with a Voltairean disregard. Sincere religious sentiment, like that seen in Homer, is more preoccupied with ominous entities like Fate, Necessity, or Destiny—to whom even Zeus is subject—than it is with the gods of Olympus. All Greek thinking was greatly influenced by fate, which is maybe where science got the idea that natural law exists. Not the practical fertility gods of people who really tilled the soil, the gods of the Homeric nobility were those of an advancing elite. * "The gods of most nations claim to have created the world," states Gilbert Murray. The Olympians don't assert this. They only ever managed to conquer it. And what do they do when they have taken control of their kingdoms? Do they take care of the administration? Do they encourage farming? Do they engage in industry and trades? Not even close to that. What makes them worthy of any honest labor? They find it simpler to survive off of the proceeds and to punish those who fail to pay with thunderbolts. They are regal buccaneers, chieftains in conquest. They quarrel, eat, play, and create music. They also drink a lot and laugh heartily at the pathetic smith who serves them. Other than their own monarch, they never feel fear. Except in times of love and battle, they never lie. Homer's human heroes also exhibit poor behavior. The House of Pelops is the most prominent family, yet it was unable to establish a model of a contented family dynamic. The dynasty's Asian founder, Tantalo, allegedly started it all by directly disobeying the gods—that is, by tricking them into consuming his own son Pelops' flesh. Pelops, who had been miraculously brought back to life, in turn insulted. With the help of Myrtilos, Oinomaos's charioteer, he defeated the Pisan monarch in a well-known chariot race. He then threw his confederate into the water, promising to repay him. His sons Atreus and Thyestes inherited the curse, which manifested as a strong, if not completely insatiable, want to do crimes (ate). Thyestes deceived his brother's spouse, enabling him to pilfer the renowned golden-fleeced ram, the family's "luck." After securing his brother's exile, Atreus brought him back under the guise of a reunion and feasted him on the flesh of his own children. Now carrying the curse, Agamemnon, the son of Atreus, killed a sacred stag to offend Artemis, sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia to please the goddess and secure his fleet's safe passage to Troy, and was later killed by his disloyal wife Klytaimnestra and her paramour Aigisthos, a surviving son of Thyestes. Agamemnon's son Orestes then killed his mother and Aigisthos to get revenge on his father. * Homer, as a completed work, originated in Ionia, which is a region of Hellenic Asia Minor and the surrounding islands. The Homeric poetry took on their current shape at the latest in the sixth century. Additionally, Greek philosophy, mathematics, and science all got their start in this century. Concurrently, significant occurrences were taking place in other regions of the globe. If any of them existed, Confucius, Buddha, and Zoroaster most likely lived in the same century. * Cyrus founded the Persian Empire in the middle of the century; as it was coming to an end, the Greek towns of Ionia, to which the Persians had granted some autonomy, staged a failed uprising that Darius put down, sending its finest men into exile. A number of the philosophers of this age were exiles who moved from city to city throughout the regions of Greece that were still free of slavery, dispersing the culture that had hitherto mostly only existed in Ionia. In their wanderings, they received nice treatment. "This is the sort of thing we should say by the fireside in the winter-time, as we lie on soft couches, after a good meal, drinking sweet wine and crunching chickpeas: 'Of what country are you, and how old are you, good Sir?'" says Xenophanes, a flourishing figure in the later half of the sixth century among the refugees. What was your age when the Mede materialized?Ionia was temporarily freed following the victories at Salamis and Plataea, which helped the rest of Greece maintain its freedom. * Greece was split up into several little, autonomous states, each made up of a city and some surrounding agricultural land. Throughout the Greek world, the degree of civilization varied greatly, and the majority of achievements made by the Greeks came from a small number of places. Sparta was significant militarily but not culturally; I will talk more about it later. Although Corinth was a thriving economic hub and wealthy city, it lacked notable individuals. Then there were rural settlements dedicated to agriculture, like the fabled Arcadia, which townspeople thought was peaceful but was actually home to many old tragedies reminiscent of barbarism. The locals worshipped Pan and practiced a variety of fertility rituals, frequently substituting a simple square pillar for a figure of the deity. Because the peasants were too impoverished to own bulls, the goat was seen as a fertility symbol. The statue of Pan was battered at a time of food scarcity. (Similiar practices persist in isolated Chinese communities.) There was a clan of alleged were-wolves, perhaps connected to cannibalism and human sacrifice. It was believed that anyone who sampled the flesh of a human victim offered for sacrifice turned into a werewolf. There was a cave that belonged to Zeus Lykaios, also known as the wolf-Zeus; nobody had a shadow within, and anybody who entered would perish a year later. In classical times, all of this superstition was still quite popular. * Pan's more famous title, which is understood to represent the All-God, came from Athens adopting his worship in the fifth century during the Persian conflict. Pan's initial name was "Paon," which meant the feeder or shepherd. * Nonetheless, there seems to have been a lot of what we would consider religion in the modern sense in ancient Greece. This had to do, not with the Olympians, but with Dionysus, sometimes known as Bacchus, who we naturally associate with the rather dubious deity of wine and intoxication. It is really interesting how, from his adoration, a profound mysticism emerged that shaped Christian theology and affected many other thinkers. Anyone interested in studying the evolution of Greek philosophy should understand this. Bacchus, also known as Dionysus, was formerly a Thracian deity. The Greeks considered the Thracians to be barbarians, and they were far less cultured than they were. They worshipped a fertility god and practiced fertility rituals, much like all prehistoric farmers. He went by Bacchus. It was never entirely evident if Bacchus was shaped like a bull or like a man. They revered Bacchus and considered drunkenness to be heavenly when they figured out how to produce beer. They had even higher opinions of him when they eventually got to know the vine and learned how to sip wine. His roles in fostering fecundity in general were mostly eclipsed by his roles in regard to the grape and the wine's ability to induce divine insanity. It is unknown when his devotion moved from Thrace to Greece, although it appears to have happened just before the dawn of history. Despite the opposition of the orthodox, the worship of Bacchus managed to gain traction. There were many savage aspects to it, such mutilating and devouring entire wild creatures uncooked. There was an odd feminist component to it. In big groups, honorable mothers and servants would spend entire evenings dancing in the ecstasy-inducing sands, possibly partially from wine consumption but primarily through mystical intoxication. Although they considered the practice irritating, husbands were afraid to disagree with religion. Euripides' Bacchae illustrates the cult's brutality as well as its beauty. It is hardly unexpected that Bacchus was so successful in Greece. The Greeks, or at least a segment of them, acquired a fondness for the primeval and a yearning for a more intuitive and passionate way of life than what is now considered morally acceptable, much like all societies that have become civilized swiftly. For the individual who is compelled to exhibit more refined behavior than emotions, virtue is perceived as a burden and a form of enslavement, and logic is annoying. This causes a response in terms of behavior, emotion, and thinking. We shall be particularly concerned with the response in mind, but first we need to address the response in behavior and emotion. The essential quality that sets a civilized man apart from a barbarian is caution, or, to put it another way, foresight. Even if future joys are rather far off, he is prepared to put up with present suffering in order to enjoy them in the future. With the advent of agriculture, this practice became increasingly significant since, with the exception of a few completely instinctual behaviors like bees producing honey or squirrels burrowing nuts, neither animal nor savage would labor in the spring to ensure they would have sustenance for the next winter. In these situations, there is no premeditation; rather, there is a spontaneous drive to do something that, to the observer, would undoubtedly be helpful in the future. Only when a guy acts against his impulses because reason tells him he will benefit from them later on in life does true foresight emerge. Hunting is a fun activity that doesn't involve planning, while tilling the soil is labor-intensive and cannot be done on an impulse. In addition to planning, which is a self-administered check, civilization uses law, custom, and religion to restrain impulse. It takes this check from savagery, but it makes it more methodical and less instinctual. Some behaviors are classified as illegal and subject to punishment; others, while not subject to legal consequences, are labeled as evil and subject the perpetrators to societal censure. Women are subjected to the institution of private property, which also typically results in the establishment of a slave class. The community imposes its goals on each person, but the individual also increasingly sacrifices the now for the future since they have developed the habit of seeing their life as a totality. It is clear that this process might go too far—the miser, for example—because of this. However, caution can easily result in the loss of some of life's greatest treasures if one does not take drastic measures. The Bacchus worshipper responds negatively to caution. He regains an intensity of emotion that caution had lost when he is intoxicated, either physically or spiritually; he discovers that the world is full of beauty and joy, and his imagination is suddenly freed from the prison of daily concerns. The Bacchic rite resulted in a phenomenon known as "enthusiasm," which etymologically translates as having the deity enter the worshipper, who felt that he became a part of the god. A significant portion of the greatest achievements made by humans have involved drunkenness or the blinding of caution with enthusiasm. Life would be boring without the Bacchic element; it is hazardous when it exists. A struggle between passion and prudence has existed throughout history. We shouldn't take a complete stance on either side of the dispute. Within the realm of ideas, science and sober civilization are basically equivalent. However, pure knowledge is unsatisfying; mankind also want emotion, art, and religion. Knowledge may have boundaries defined by science, but creativity shouldn't be restricted. Like philosophers of other eras, Greek philosophers were divided into two groups: the first were essentially scientific, while the latter owed a great deal, either directly or indirectly, to Bacchus' cult. This is particularly true of Plato and the subsequent changes that came to be represented in Christian theology via him. In many respects, the early worship of Bacchus was barbaric and disgusting. It was not this form that affected the philosophers, but rather the austere, spiritualized form ascribed to Orpheus, which replaced physical drunkenness with mental intoxication. Although faint, Orpheus is an intriguing figure. While some believe he was a real man, others believe he was a deity or a mythical figure. Like Bacchus, he was traditionally thought to have originated in Thrace, although it is more likely that he (or the movement bearing his name) originated in Crete. It is undeniable that a great deal of the Orphic beliefs appears to have originated in Egypt, and Egypt primarily affected Greece through Crete. According to legend, Orpheus was a reformer who was destroyed by crazed Maenads driven mad by Bacchic dogma. In the earlier versions of the legend, his addiction to music was less apparent than it eventually became. He was a priest and a philosopher first and foremost. Whatever Orpheus's lessons may have been (if he actually lived), they are well recognized. They preached that souls transmigrate and that, depending on how a soul lived its life on Earth, it may either experience eternal happiness or temporary or eternal suffering in the hereafter. Their goal was to become "pure," in part through purification rituals and in part by avoiding specific types of pollution. The most traditional among them avoided eating anything animal-based, unless it was consumed sacramentally on special occasions. They believed that man is made of both heaven and earth; a clean life increases the heavenly portion while decreasing the worldly half. Ultimately, a man might unite with Bacchus and be referred to as “a Bacchus.” A complex theology postulated that Bacchus was born twice, once from the thigh of his father Zeus and once from his mother Semele. The myth of Bacchus exists in several forms. In one of them, Bacchus, the son of Zeus and Persephone, is ripped to pieces by Titans when he is still a little kid, with the exception of his heart, which they consume. Bacchus's second child was born as a result of the heart, which some claim Zeus gave to Semele and others claim he devoured. The wild animal was thought to be a manifestation of God, and Bacchae's act of shredding it and consuming its raw flesh was meant to ire-enact the Titans' tearing and eating of Bacchus. The Titans were born of dirt, but they gained a hint of divinity by swallowing the deity. him is therefore somewhat earthly and partially divine, and the goal of Bacchic rituals was to bring him closer to being fully divine. * Lord of Europa's Tyrian line, Zeus-born, who holdsest at thy feet The hundred citadels of Crete, I seek to Thee from that dim shrine, Roofed by the Quick and Carven Beam, By Chalyb steel and wild bull's blood, In flawless joints of Cypress wood Made steadfast, says Euripides in an instructive monologue delivered to an Orphic priest. My days have flowed there in a single, clean stream. I, Initiate, the servant of Idaean Jove; * Where midnight Zagreus* roves, I rove; I have borne his thunder-cry; I have fulfilled his feasts of crimson and blood; I have held the mountain flame of the Great Mother; I am freed and called A Bacchos of the Mailed Priests. Clad in pristine white, I have been delivered from the filthy birth of man and his sealed clay, banishing all flesh from my mouth wherever life has existed. Orphic tablets, which teach the deceased person's spirit on how to navigate the afterlife and what to say to demonstrate their merit for salvation, have been discovered in graves. The most nearly complete (the Petelia tablet) reads as follows: You will discover a wellspring to the left of the House of Hades, with a white cypress tree beside it. The other tablets are shattered and unfinished. This spring is not close to this approach. However, you will discover another at the Lake of Memory, where guardians stand before cold water that flows forth. Say this: "My race is of Heaven (alone), but I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven." This, you are aware of. And then I die, my hunger quenching me. allow me the chilly water that flows from the Lake of Memory right now. And they will allow you access to the sacred spring so you can drink it. After that, you will be a lord among the other heroes. "Hail, Thou who has suffered the suffering," reads a another tablet. Then again, "Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be God instead of mortal." Lethe, which causes amnesia, is the well-spring from which the soul is forbidden to drink, and Mnemosyne, which causes memory, is the other well-spring. If the soul is to be saved in the hereafter, it must not forget; rather, it must develop a memory that is greater than the normal one. The wine was just a symbol to the Orphics, who were an austere group that eventually adopted the Christian sacrament as its own. Their desired state of intoxication was "enthusiasm," or one with the divine. In this way, they saw themselves as gaining esoteric wisdom beyond the reach of common understanding. Pythagoras, a reformer of Orphism, introduced this mystical element into Greek philosophy, much as Orpheus had reformatted the religion of Bacchus. Orphic aspects came from Pythagoras into Plato's philosophy, and from Plato into the majority of subsequent philosophy that was religious in some way. Some unquestionably Bacchic aspects persisted in any environment where Orphism was prevalent. One of these was feminism, which Pythagoras discussed extensively and which Plato even said extended political equality for women. Pythagoras asserts that women "are more naturally akin to piety" and that reverence for intense emotion was another Bacchic component. Greek tragedy originated with the Dionysus rituals. Particularly Euripides honored Bacchus and Eros, the two main orphism gods. He has little regard for the aloof, well-mannered, selfrighteous man who, in his tragedies, is likely to be driven insane or suffer some other terrible fate at the hands of the gods who are angry with him for his heresy. The common myth about the Greeks is that they were incredibly serene, so serene that they could observe passion from the outside and recognize its beauty while remaining serene and godlike themselves. This viewpoint is incredibly biased. It may be true of Homer, Sophocles, and Aristotle, but it is categorically untrue of those Greeks who were influenced by Bacchic or Orphic influences, either directly or indirectly. At Eleusis, a song was chanted, proclaiming: "With Thy wine-cup waving high, With Thy maddening revelry, To Eleusis’ flowery vale, Comest Thou—Bacchus, Paean, hail!" The Eleusinian rituals were the most holy aspect of the Athenian State religion. The chorus of Maenads in Euripides' Bacchae exhibits a juxtaposition of brutality and poetry that is the exact opposite of tranquil. O glad, glad on the mountains to swoon in the race outworn, when the holy fawn-skin clings and all else sweeps away, To the joy of the quick red fountains, The blood of the hill-goat torn, The glory of wild-beast ravenings Where the hill-top catches the day, To the Phrygian, Lydian mountains 'Tis Bromios leads the way. They celebrate the joy of tearing a wild animal limb from limb and eating it raw there and then and there. The Maenads' dance on the mountainside was not only furious, but it also served as a gateway to a realm of nonhuman beauty and the freedom of the wind and stars, away from the worries and burdens of civilization (Bromios was only one of Bacchus' many titles). They sing, "Will they ever come to me, ever again, the long, long dances, On through the dark till the dim stars wane?" in a less frantic tone. Will I be able to feel the breeze flowing through my hair and the dew on my throat? Will our pale feet sparkle in the shadowy stretches? O the fawn's feet to the greenwood fled, alone in the beauty and the grass; the hunted's leap, no longer filled with fear, beyond the terrible crush and snares. Is it dread or delight, ye storm-swift feet, that a voice yet far off cries out? A voice and fear and a haste of hounds, O furiously laboring, ferociously fleet, Onward yet by river and valley. To the sweet, lonely places where no one speaks, and where the tiny creatures of the forest dwell in the dark green, hidden away. Before you say again that the Greeks were "serene," consider how Philadelphia mothers would act, even in a Eugene O'Neill play. The Orphic is no more "serene" than the Bacchus worshipper who has not undergone reform. The Orphic views this world as a place of suffering and exhaustion. We are attached to a wheel that revolves in perpetual cycles of birth and death; although we are bonded to the ground, our actual existence is found among the stars. We can only break free from the cycle and ultimately arrive at the bliss of one with God via purification, renunciation, and an austere lifestyle. This is not the perspective of men who lead simple and enjoyable lives. It sounds more like the Negro spiritual: "When I get home, I'm going to tell God all of my troubles." Though not all Greeks were like this, a good many of them were passionate, dissatisfied, and at odds with themselves. They were propelled in different directions by their emotions and intellect, had the creativity to imagine paradise and the deliberate self-assertion to build hell. Despite adhering to the dictum that "nothing is too much," they were excessive in all respects, including pure thinking, poetry, religion, and sin. When they were great, it was their passion mixed with intelligence that made them exceptional. Together, they could not have changed the world in the same way that they did. In mythology, Prometheus—who brought fire from heaven and was rewarded with eternal torment—serves as their model instead of Olympian Zeus. There were, in fact, two tendencies in Greece: one was passionate, religious, mystical, otherworldly, and the other was cheerful, empirical, rationalistic, and interested in learning about a variety of facts. If these were taken to characterize the Greeks as a whole, however, what has just been said would be just as biased as the idea that the Greeks were known for their "serenity." This latter approach is shown by Herodotus, the early Ionian thinkers, and, to some extent, Aristotle. "But the Greek nation was too full of youthful vigor for the general acceptance of a belief which denies this world and transfers real life to the Beyond," Beloch (op. cit. I, I, p. 434) states after explaining Orphism. As a result, the Orphic doctrine stayed within the relatively small circle of initiates and had no impact whatsoever on the state religion—not even in cities like Athens that had adopted the mystery celebration as a state ritual and given it legal protection. It will take a millennium for these concepts—albeit in a very different theological garb, to be sure—to triumph in the Greek culture. This seems a bit dramatic, especially in the case of the Orphistic Eleusinian rituals. In general, rationalists hated orphism, whereas religious temperaments gravitated toward it. Its standing may be compared to that of Methodism in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. We have a fair idea of what an educated Greek learned from his father, but not much about what he learned from his mother when he was younger since she was mostly isolated from the society that the males enjoyed. Even during the best of times, educated Athenians most likely held onto a more primitive way of thinking and feeling from childhood and tradition, which would always come through in stressful situations. This is likely true even for the most rationalistic Athenians in their explicitly conscious mental processes. Because of this, a straightforward examination of the Greek worldview is unlikely to be sufficient. It was not until recently that the impact of religion, especially non-Olympian religion, on Greek philosophy was fully acknowledged. Jane Harrison's groundbreaking work, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, highlighted both the primitive and Dionysiac aspects of the religion practiced by common Greeks. Similarly, F. M. Cornford's From Religion to Philosophy attempted to educate Greek philosophy students about the impact of religion on the philosophers, although it is not entirely reliable in many of its interpretations or its anthropology. The best explanation of this conflict between science and religion that I am aware of is found in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, particularly in Chapter II, "Science and Religion." He attributes it to "the religious revival which swept over Hellas in the sixth century B.C." and the change in location from Ionia to the West. He states that "the religion of Ionia had developed in a very different way from that of continental Hellas." Specifically, the worship of Dionysus—a god who originated in Thrace and is seldom referenced in Homer—contained the seeds of a whole new perspective on how humans relate to the rest of creation. It would be incorrect to ascribe any extremely lofty beliefs to the Thracians themselves, but there is no denying that the Greeks understood the experience of ecstasy to imply that the soul was more than just a weak doppelgänger and that it could only reveal its actual nature when it was "out of the body." It appeared as though Greek religion would soon advance to a level comparable to that attained by Eastern faiths. If not for the development of science, it is difficult to imagine a counterbalance to this trend. It is customary to argue that the Greeks' lack of a priesthood prevented them from adopting an Orientalist religion, but this is mistaking the result for the cause. Although they protect dogmas after they are established, priesthoods do not create them. Moreover, the Oriental peoples did not have priesthoods in the traditional sense when they were first developing. Greece was rescued more by the existence of the scientific schools than by the lack of a priesthood. The founding of the Orphic communities marked the pinnacle of growth for the new religion, which was both new and ancient in different contexts. As far as we can tell, they originated in Attika; yet, they spread quite quickly, particularly throughout Sicily and Southern Italy. They were primarily organizations for the worship of Dionysus, but they stood out from the rest of the Hellenes with two novel characteristics. They were set up as fictitious groups and looked to a revelation as the basis of religious authority. Burnet continues, "There is a striking similarity between Orphic beliefs and those prevalent in India at about the same time. However, he holds that there cannot have been any contact." The poems that contained their theology were attributed to the Thracian Orpheus, who had himself descended into Hades and was therefore a safe guide through the perils which beset the disembodied soul in the next world. He continues by explaining the original meaning of the word "orgy," which the Orphics used to refer to "sacrament," with the goal of purifying the believer's soul and allowing it to transcend the circle of birth. Unlike the priests of the Olympian cults, the Orphics established what we could term "churches," that is, religious groups to which anybody may be initiated without regard to race or gender. It was under their influence that philosophy came to be understood as a way of life.